Growing Up
by KhalaniK
Summary: Treize tries to figure it all out.
1. Prologue

Believe me, I love me some yaoi. It's all I've written so far. But in this instance, my desire to tell a story overrode my pairing preferences. This is het. And as such, I'm going into this knowing that this story won't win any popularity contests. But somebody out there might at least find it interesting, which is why I'm sharing it.

I dusted off my copy of the Episode Zero manga a while ago and found myself getting into Heero's story. This story uses the manga as a jump-off point. I'm not going to write around the dialogue and precise actions. It will be a rough guide, not a recipe. I'm going to change things, words, and implications. Because the truth is that, aside from the supplemental information it provides the series, I'm not an enormous fan of the manga.

Pairing: Treize/Leia

Warnings: Combat violence, light mutilation of canon, het sexuality/sensuality (nothing too graphic), military stuff.

I'll be using officer rank as indicated by the armies of America, Canada, Britain, and Australia. The story takes place episodically in the years 188/189. Treize is seventeen/eighteen.

This story is dedicated to LoveyouHateyou, whose amazing talent and kind, constructive support continually inspires me to keep writing, even when I don't think I can write any more. You can find a link to his profile and work in my Favorite Authors section.

I hope you enjoy, even if het isn't your cup of tea.

xXx

Prologue: November 17th, 189.

The docking clamps sound like they're grinding into the sides of the shuttle as they lock into place. Treize is already on edge, and the colony's rough reception does nothing to settle him. The infrastructure. The halted development. The unrest. It's all rough, even though it's the newest colony in the Earth Sphere. It is the most prevalent of the colony's many contradictions.

The shuffle to disembark is short and marked by little casual interaction. None of the eleven of forty possible passengers seem particularly moved by their destination as they mechanically unharness their luggage from overhead bins and collect their personal effects. Most wear the same look as Treize: thinly-veiled apprehension.

He carries nothing more than the casual clothes he's wearing and the wallet in his pocket. He's not staying. He can't. He has a 0330 wake-up tomorrow morning, like every morning. He has formation to lead. Training to plan and conduct. Soldiers to mold. He has to carry on like nothing in his life has changed dramatically. Completely. Irreversibly. He has to, because it's the only way he can grasp it.

After a sharp-eyed and curt customs interview, an attitude assumed only after Treize presented his Federation identification, he leaves the terminal with compounded unease and hits the street on foot. The colony appears the same as when he left it last. The same buildings that were only half-constructed are still webbed with scaffolding and overlooked by unmoving cranes. The people look just as cagey and hurried as he remembers, like typical big-city dwellers. Though this is no typical big city. It's X-18999, a colony whose citizens bear its already heavy burden wordlessly. But it's there, in the slump of their shoulders and the reservation in their stride. Treize stands out among them. An Earther. A soldier. A square-shouldered young man who, even in his sour-stomached distraction, presents himself like he's been bred and trained to. It's as automatic as an inhalation.

He walks inattentive to where he's headed. He's nervous, unsure, and, perhaps, a little bitter. He shouldn't have to be going through this. He shouldn't have to feel the way he does, a way so contrary to his typical perspective and comportment that he feels alien to himself. The foreign sting of self-pity bites into him, and today he revels in it. Wallows and sighs dramatically in it. He cuts himself a break, because doesn't he deserve it? Look what's become of his life. Look what his reality has become. Look at me, he thinks. Look at me.

The self-pity leaves him somewhere between Districts One and Three, as he approaches the sprawling campus of Barton Plaza. It's a name that was so blessedly far from his mind for a few months. Had he unwittingly ejected it from his consciousness, or had it been the natural progression of a phase's passing?

Passing. If only, he thinks.

This kind of brooding doesn't suit him. It's tiresome, and he wonders how certain people hold to such moods as he considers how to occupy his time for the next hour. He crosses into Triple-Nine's equivalent of the Champs-Elysees, which has none of the glamour or caliber of merchandise but rather puts on a valiant effort to imitate breezy greenness with sapling maple instead of full chestnut and fans instead of wind. The charm of the few boutiques and cafes is obliterated by the unattractive and gaudy faces of cheapy super-retail joints that have elbowed their way in with the tightening of common belts. It makes for strange juxtapositions, impossible ones. Merced & Dominico nested between Lowrey's and QuickShop.

Humor pulls at the corner of Treize's mouth, and he feels a knot at the nape of his neck uncoil by small degrees. It's not funny, not when he thinks about what it's indicative of, but he needs a laugh right now, no matter how dark. He stops in front of a shop he's never heard of, one that speaks to the purpose of his visit. For a few moments his eyes pass, unseeing, over the window displays as his brain scrambles to make a decision. Go in, walk on. Go in, walk on. Go in… Go in? Go in.

And so he does.


	2. Chapter 1

**See prologue for warnings, notes, etc.**

xXx

September 7th, 188

Treize rolls his issue jeep up to the athletic field right on time, conduct that would be considered brow-raisingly undisciplined – even lazy – for any other soldier but him. But it's his formation. His company. His soldiers. His schedule. Formation starts when he gets there and not a minute sooner. There is something about this that makes him smirk, a subdued, dignified relative of giddiness, a light tickle of headiness. He sits for a moment, hands clutched loosely on the wheel, and just looks at it. It's in flickering, fleeting minutes like these that he feels indescribably fortunate to be where he is, and, at this moment, he has absolute purpose. Clarity. The road ahead of him rests prostrate at his feet, unobstructed and tacitly promising.

Five platoons of thirty Specials officers each await him, ranked and filed in neat rows and columns. They stand at ease, chatting, shooting the shit, until Treize bounces out of the vehicle with what some would argue is too much vigor for 0430 physical training. He's dressed like they are in green shorts, a black long-sleeved tee, and athletic shoes. The only thing that distinguishes him is the insignia on the reflective belt around his narrow hips indicating his superior rank. It is a snapshot of his leadership philosophy, one that commits him to every breath, strain, and triumph of his company.

Treize loves PT. He gets high on the early mornings, the smell of the wet grass, the physical endeavoring. He thrives on the sound of his officers yelling through drill after grueling drill, counting in unison, egging each other on, offering boisterous shouts of encouragement and the occasional gentle mocking. Morning PT is overwhelmingly unpopular from approximately 03:30 to 04:30, ill favor that decreases markedly by leaps with the surge of adrenaline and endorphins that pumps into the young blood of the officers as they run one another ragged. And by the end of the duty day, when other units are only beginning their PT, the soldiers of Alpha company are on their way to their homes and families and evenings with friends. They respect Treize for respecting them, for acknowledging that they're people first and soldiers second.

Many soldiers from other companies want to be in unit, and the other company commanders dislike him for this and other legitimate and illegitimate reasons. They call him a sexist for appointing a female as his executive officer after passing over dozens of men who had more points and greater experience. They say that his big nose is up the battalion commander's ass, that he's a self-serving, prissy poser, that he's only where he is because of a broad production of nepotistic string-pulling. None of these men have seen Treize as anything but an adversary, and none have dared attempt to uncover the reasons that so many of their soldiers apply for lateral transfers each quarter.

His steps are well-measured and purposeful as his feet hit the field. Any observing civilian would swiftly grasp who was in charge, even without knowing a thing about military pomp and procedure. It's the way Treize carries himself. Shoulders back, arms easy, chin high. His critics mock it as a swagger, though the description falls flat in that there's decided economy in his movements that keeps him from the damning brand of the strutting peacock.

His executive officer, Lieutenant Koh, stands at the head of the formation. She snaps to the position of attention. "Company!"

The five platoon leaders, standing in front of each respective group, call "Platoon!" over their shoulders.

Koh crows out once more, her alto timbre carried by the morning chill: "Attention!"

In a single fluid motion that gives Treize butterflies every time because of its flawless orchestration, the entire company snaps their heels of their sneakers together and straightens their arms to a position that makes each one look quintessentially soldierly. A barely perceivable smile tugs at the left side of his mouth as he steps in front of Koh and exchanges salutes with her, a signal that transfers power from the twenty-two-year-old lieutenant to the seventeen-year-old captain. Koh runs to the back of first platoon.

Treize casts a long look over the force, the sheer might at his command, and calls them to ease.

"Good morning, Alpha company!"

"Good morning, Sir!"

"That was pathetic," he chides, as he often must do so early in the day. "I said, 'Good morning, Alpha company!'"

"Good morning, Sir!!"

"Better. Now, who is leading PT today?"

"I am, Sir!" a soft, accented male voice calls from the back of second platoon.

"Dia?" He can't see the lieutenant's face among the ranks, but he knows the voice of every officer in his company. Every name, first and last. Every country of origin. A good smattering of birthdates. "You don't sound like you're ready to lead PT."

"I am, Sir!"

"I hope you plan on working us hard, Lieutenant Dia. I feel like sweating this morning." He doesn't really. He's worn out and sleep-deprived from a long, rare sort of night. But his soldiers don't know that, and his comment makes a few of them whoop in agreement. He takes the cue and builds on it.

"Because you all know where we're going in two weeks, yes?"

The response is even louder, interjected with a few enthusiastic expletives that Treize doesn't particularly mind because, in truth, he's just as excited as they are.

"And who do you think is going to come out on top?"

Whether it's 'Us!' or 'We are!' or 'Alpha Company!' the message is clear: the soldiers of Alpha Company have every intention of winning the upcoming Specials Corps annual Continental War Games. They've been training for it ever since their unit popped up on the participation list the month prior. It was a slot earned by an exemplary combat and support history, high average PT scores, an intimidating percentage of Officer of the Year finalists, and a nearly spotless disciplinary record. Treize is proud of them, honored by the opportunity to compete, and absolutely certain of his company's impending success there.

"That's right. And that's because every single day we're out here on this field, we work until there's nothing left of us to break down. We push each other, and even when we think we can't go any farther, we always do, don't we?"

"Yes Sir!"

His eyes flash with an intensity that reflects back at him from the crowd. He knows then that they'll do whatever he asks of them, a truth that awoke near-terror in him the first time he acknowledged it. But he's grown into his position, and he now wields their submission and trust in him with artful, conscientious expertise.

"What we do out here every morning is what is going to lead us to victory. Never forget why we train like this, ladies and gentlemen." All 150 faces locked on him are now clear and bright with anticipation and pride. "We train to fight, and we train to win."

"Train to fight, train to win!" all repeat. It's the company motto, selected by Treize when took command of the company three months ago. The previous motto had been a very uninspiring 'Alpha all the way!' 'All the way to what?' he'd muttered to himself with a snort.

"Lieutenant Dia!"

"Sir!"

"Take this formation and make us suffer."

xXx

Treize is the only one in the elevator that climbs slowly to the sixth floor of the command center. He would have opted for the stairs, but Dia did to the company exactly what he'd been ordered to, and Treize wasn't certain that he could have made it up all six flights without a pause. It's a pleasant sort of weakness, one that makes him conscious of every step as he moves down the hallway past budget, logistics, and security offices staffed largely with Federation civilians. A few greet him by name as he passes, and he pops his head into the transportation office to congratulate Mr. Issvoran on his promotion to department chief. He asks about the man's son, mentions that he saw his wife at the commissary, and takes Issvoran's hand in a firm shake while apologizing for the brevity, for he really must be moving along.

At the end of the hall, he passes through a set of frosted glass double-doors into the reception room that filters traffic in and out of battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Renzetti's office. Treize is three minutes early, and Renzetti's secretary presses his thumb to the receiver of his small headset and invites Treize to go in whenever he pleases. Treize raps his knuckle lightly on the reception desk with a nod and a thank-you and discretely pulls down on his dress uniform jacket as he passes through the threshold of the battalion commander's spacious office.

Standing by the window are two individuals, both of whom Treize recognizes immediately. One is Renzetti, a gab-gifted, thirty-something, decorated Specials officer who appears at present to be foisting some overwrought charm on the young woman who turns the moment she hears Treize's steps on the carpet. She's as tall as Treize, dressed sharply in the fitted olive green of the Federation. Her black hair is pulled back into a smooth bun that's been recreated probably every day for what Treize guesses must be eight to ten years, based on the rank on her collar. Renzetti turns and greets him with an uneven smile.

"Captain Khushrenada," the older man announces as Treize stops just a meter shy of the door. "Good to see you."

"And you, Sir," Treize supplies distractedly as a wave of panic-like heat warms his face. It's the woman, the one who's giving him a certain look from beneath long, mascara-painted lashes. The full force of her stature and dark, Persian beauty floors him. Again.

"Treize, this is Major Hoda Khani, from the Federation Ethics Oversight Committee. She flew in yesterday from Singapore for command inspection."

Ethics inspection. Not two words Treize enjoys hearing in any context, let alone the one he's unwittingly created. But then, he hadn't asked what the purpose of her visit was.

"Ethics oversight. Fantastic," Treize repeats, all false brightness, as he unplants himself and steps forward to properly greet the woman he's certainly not supposed to know the way he does.

"Good to see you again, Captain," Khani replies as she deliberately squeezes the hand that's been offered to her. She releases it slowly and addresses Renzetti. "We met last night at the officers' club."

Treize tries to remember how he got from his office at the company to the officers' club. Yesterday was a terrible day spent petitioning for funding, pleading his case, enduring scoffing laughs from the civilian resource manager who dismissed his requests as 'absolutely impossible.' He was powerless, a captain drowning in a sea of colonels, a fly buzzing at their ears, begging for what he knew would be freely given to a man two ranks higher. It was 22:30 when he started home to his quarters, and as he walked, mind choking on the flavorless grit of failure, he became unusually, uncontrollably, obsessively thirsty…

The rest, he supposed, was self-explanatory.

"Is that so?" A shadow of jealousy passes over Renzetti's face, and he attempts to recover himself with a weak cry of "Oh, for the days of the single life!"

His grasp for sympathy goes unmet. Major Khani nods without understanding, and her vividly hazel eyes flit to Treize's face. He smiles thinly, and in a quick, crude succession, he thinks of the birth mark on her left breast. The rise of her hip. How loud she was, completely, wickedly, and shamelessly lacking in restraint…

Treize clears the thickness from his throat and clasps his hands behind his back. "If there is any way I can assist you throughout the course of your inspection, Ma'am, please do not hesitate to let me know."

Major Khani nods coolly, the curl of her lips a mirror of his as her mind rushes through recollections of a similarly intimate nature. "I appreciate the offer." With an abrupt transition to the seriousness befitting her rank and responsibilities, her statuesque body aligns in a long, strong line. "Colonel Renzetti." She nods again. "Captain."

Treize pulls himself into a more respectful position and waits while Renzetti and Khani exchange a few last words. As she leaves, Treize notes that Renzetti's eyes are firmly fixed on her rear end, which Treize could testify looks even better in skin-tight jeans.

"Why is it that women like that never join the Specials?" Renzetti asks in her wake. His hands are firm on his hips and his gaze is still level with her receded assets.

Treize releases a held breath as he reassures himself that there is nothing unethical about consensual relations with another adult, which he is considered by military standards, though not civilian ones. Admittedly, the matter of superior rank hadn't crossed his mind when he asked if she'd like to go somewhere quieter than the raucous rabble of the club. What a cheesy line, he thinks in retrospect, though it hadn't seemed quite so cheesy with a few drinks in him. And it had worked. It had been practically effortless.

"The physical requirements of the Specials are substantially more stringent than they are for normal Federation service, Sir," Treize offers as he crosses to the chair that's been placed for him in front of the broad expanse of Renzetti's desk. "Most females are not physically strong enough for the rigors of MS piloting."

"I guess," the commander concedes. He thoughtlessly strokes his meticulously-groomed goatee as he moves to sit in his leather executive's chair. "But they don't all have to be like your – " He presses his lips together to physically hold his comment at bay.

Without invitation, Treize sits and crosses his legs at the knee. "Like my XO," he finishes, and not without a whisper of displeasure.

"I didn't mean it like that. Lieutenant Koh is a fine soldier."

"Yes, Sir. She is."

"It's just that she's…"

Treize's left eyebrow arches slightly. "What?"

"She could bench press you with one hand."The man sinks back into his chair as he strains to clarify what he only sort of means. "I mean, she's a sturdy woman."

"She's an extraordinary athlete," Treize remarks as he smoothes over a crease in his white dress uniform pants.

"She's a dog."

Treize lifts his attention and stares blankly back at Renzetti's swiftly reddening face. His silence makes his commander shift uncomfortably and reach across his desk for an electronic tablet. He slides it in front of Treize.

"How's training for the CWG going?" Renzetti redirects.

Renzetti is young for his rank. Cheerfully ambitious. Devoted more to his battalion than to his third wife and four children. He favors Treize above the rest of his company commanders for his creativity, pragmatism, and intelligence, and he often taps the seventeen-year-old's thoughts on command and training. He's fearless in the face of accusations of favoritism, because most of those accusations are true. He gives credit where credit is due, a practice that invites more scorn than many of his other more unsavory qualities.

"It's going very well, Sir," Treize responds with renewed interest. "We are looking forward to participating." He eyes the tablet before him. This is an unusual meeting time for them, and it's then that he feels the first tugs of suspicion.

Renzetti steeples his fingers in front of his lips. "Go on and read it."

Treize takes the thin device carefully, but as he scans the document, his grip tightens with little consideration for its fragility. If he had any less self-control, he would have sworn. When he's through, he hangs onto the tablet long enough to override his urge to throw it back onto the desk. His expression is no longer cool. It's tight. Jaw clenched. As angry as his face gets in professional company, which manifests as little more than icy annoyance.

"It would be clichéd of me to ask if this is a joke, but I know it's not," Treize utters darkly. He knows that no forthcoming complaints or comments will alter the outcome dictated by the orders he's just received from Lake Victoria. The inflexibility has him pinned, and the sensation makes him want to squirm.

"No," Renzetti sighs, "I'm afraid it's not a joke." The man's face appears sympathetic, which folds over the shallow creases at the corners of his eyes, exaggerating them.

"I'm disappointed," Treize understates.

"Treize, how many years have you been an officer?"

"Four, Sir."

"And how many of your commanders have earned an instructor's medal?"

Treize uncrosses his legs and clasps his hands together tightly. "I have an instructor's medal. I left Victoria five months ago."

"Under the condition that you fulfill your obligation."

"Colonel Baldwin reassigned me before we could deploy. I was slated."

"And we needed you here desperately. And I'm sorry it's all fucked up now." Renzetti's fingers tap on the desktop pointlessly. "But you knew this was coming."

Treize purses and relaxes his lips as he settles into unwelcome resignation. "Who will take the company?"

Renzetti's laugh is breathy. "Lieutenant Koh."

Treize nods slowly, though he chafes at this. It's his company. His command. His soldiers are accustomed to the way he conducts formation, the way he calls them to attention and ease, the way he leads them, the way he arouses their confidence and enthusiasm They're his, not Koh's. Envy pinches at his molars and he bites down to grind it out.

"There's no way out of this one, man. I'm sorry. I know you were looking forward to CWG."

"It's the same week," he muses blandly over the irony.

"You still have your instructor's insignia, right?"

"Of course." Deep in the back of his closet in a shoe box he was foolishly hopeful that he'd never have to open again.

"Wanna know your draw?" Renzetti baits.

Treize nods, and his commander pulls up a screen on his laptop. He types in a couple of well-practiced passwords and makes a 'chh-chh' sound as he scans down the page.

"You are assigned to L3, colony X-18999, as the backup unit for General Septem's upcoming visit with a mister Dekim Barton, the chief colonial representatives, blah, blah, blah, and you're with…"

Treize's head tilts to the side in his disbelief. Triple-Nine is no place for cadets, Specials or otherwise. It's a hothouse of rebel activity. Smart rebels. Well-organized. Principled. The probability of engagement is higher on Triple-Nine than the other colonies, which is exponentially higher than the overwhelming majority of the other cadet tours that all Victoria instructors must commit to in order to earn the right to wear their medal. Far from the typical tour featuring vaguely humanitarian themes for PR's sake, this assignment seems both unfitting and unnecessarily risky.

"Bresman, Ferris, and Noin."

He's visibly relieved when Zechs' name isn't called. While a substantial part of him would be grateful for the guarantee of extraordinary mission support, Treize clings stubbornly to a heartfelt concern for his friend's safety. It's a clinging he knows he'll have to outgrow, for Zechs is a mere six months from commission. It settles him to keep the inevitable at bay a little longer, to linger in denial over Zechs' choice to become a soldier. Like Treize. Because, he said, of Treize. It's enough to make Treize want to resign some days, when the philosophical wrongness and fear strikes him hard and makes him wonder whether they should even be friends at all.

Treize refocuses his thoughts on the team of three selected by Victoria command. Noin alone is a godsend, and the males' names are familiar enough to him that he remembers the high echelon in which their talents reside. It's a good team, he decides. Perhaps one of the best he could ask for.

But it's a terrible mission. Shadowing General Septem is thinly-veiled codespeak for sniping for wolves as they circle the spayed carcass of a sacrificial goat. The general has never been one for intentionally placing himself in harm's way, and Treize rapidly concocts the theory that the visit to Triple-Nine was conspired by Noventa to lure the formidable rebel cell out into the open. If Treize's unit engages, it will be the Specials' first demonstrated presence there. They will be expected to make an impression, though why the impression must be made by him and three de facto civilians in uniform escapes him. He wonders if it doesn't have something to do with Catalonia wanting to piss on Noventa's boots a little, and this strikes him as a poor reason to put cadets in the very real way of harm.

"I don't like this scenario," Renzetti admits as he rocks back in his chair. "It reeks."

"For good reason."

"You own this. You'll execute, you'll return, take back your company, and earn heaps of accolades for yourself and your unit. Then you'll get your second notch, and I bet Cynthia's alimony that I'll be saluting you someday."

This prediction does not seem preposterously unrealistic to Treize. He's planning for it, and even as he expects it as much as Renzetti does, he shakes his head with upturned mouth. "I doubt that very much." He pauses. "Sir."


	3. Chapter 2

See prologue for notes, warnings, etc.

xXx

Chapter 2: Late September 188

"You wanted to see me, Instructor?"

Treize looks up from his far right monitor, where data from a diagnostic scan present conclusions in long strings of code and numbers only discernible to those who've been trained to read them.

"Yes. Give me a moment, please," he replies quietly, eyes back on his data, sharp and scanning, scanning. His mouth forms a hard line of concentration.

Cadet Lucrezia Noin nods and steps back from the hatch of her superior's mobile suit. She stops when her back hits the guard rail of the retractable loading platform that presently cages in the three Leos stored in the deep hull of their transport ship. She looks down the line of suits. The arithmetic is off, she notices once more – three suits for four people. Treize has laid claim to his, and further unit assignments have been the subject of speculation among the three cadets. Tense speculation, the persistent, sleep-invading, gnawing kind that's just shy of aggression.

She watches as Treize emerges effortlessly from his Leo, dressed-down for grease monkey work in the olive t-shirt that's typically hidden below camouflage uniform blouse. He wipes his hands on a lightly soiled rag and then stoops to stuff it into the cargo pocket of his combat pants. Her fists tighten at her sides, and she stands at attention until he waves her to ease.

"I want to talk to you about combat assignments, should the situation necessitate engagement."

He stands squarely in front of her and brushes his sweat-damp hair from his forehead with the back of his wrist. He regards his student with veiled interest. She's small but densely muscled, strong enough to manipulate tons of titanium alloy with considerable skill. A notable rarity among girls. Her violet eyes are keen and always on guard, and her chin is thrust out in a silent challenge to anyone who dares question her capabilities. She's openly suspicious of what he's about to tell her, which shows in the crease between her brows that adds a few years to her baby face.

"When we dock, I want you to go with Sergeant Yoder to the central command center."

"Sir – "

He holds out a forbidding hand. The oil-smudged bandage at the second joint of his index finger is rusty with bleed-through. "You will be my eyes and ears. You will relay quick and accurate real-time intelligence to me. To Bresman and Ferris."

Noin takes a confrontational step forward, forgetting everything about rank and deference except for the perfunctory address to him that ejects forcefully from her lips. "Sir, I can – "

"I know you can."

She grits her teeth and bites back what's been edging up her throat since they left Earth.

"What do you know about me?" Treize asks, lengthening the distance between them and leaning back against the rail opposite his former student. "What have you heard?"

"Nothing that would be appropriate or respectful to repeat," Noin tries not to spit.

"Speak freely," he invites. "I mean it. What have you heard?"

"That you're a misogynist. A womanizer." She likes the taste of the free insult on her tongue, and she feels the pull of a self-satisfied smirk. "That you sleep with your subordinates. And your superiors. That you don't treat male and female soldiers the same."

Treize is unsurprised. These charges are worn to tatters, and they've been accused of him with far greater malice than he's received from the thirteen-year-old proto-soldier before him. "And you think that what I'm doing to you right now is part and parcel."

"Yes. I do."

"I do treat male and female soldiers differently. Do you know why that is?"

"Because you think less of women." As she says this, the full bluster of her certainty chokes back as it strikes her that, perhaps, this is too simple for the man known above all things for his inscrutability.

Treize laughs. Softly, dryly. "A favorite misconception." But accusation gnaws at him, because for much of his life it was true, and sometimes he wonders whether he's completely grown out of it. "There's a reason I keep women so close, and it's not the reason you're inclined to believe."

She looks at him uncertainly and crosses her arms over her chest for lack of anything different to do with her hands.

"A man and a woman can look at the same puzzle and see two different things. Neither is necessarily more correct, but each perspective is unique. When I look at a problem, when I'm considering a tactic or a strategy, I see this much of the picture." He holds his hands out parallel to each other, like he's holding a box as wide as his torso. "But when I have someone I trust next to me, helping me, someone with intrinsically different approaches and considerations, I can see this much of the picture." His then hands extend well beyond the breadth of his shoulders.

"As a group," he continues, "I value female officers far more than males, perhaps because you are such a unique occurrence in the Corps. You may not appreciate that answer, because you seem to be of the mind that you should be treated equally. But that is not how I utilize the abilities of my soldiers."

His blue eyes narrow and bore with blunt, unflinching force into Noin's. "So many females enter the service and think that the only way they can succeed is by adopting false masculinity. They cut their hair off. Deny their instincts. Suppress their empathy."

Noin lowers her gaze to her instructor's shins, where his pants are bloused at the tops of mid-calf combat boots. Shined well beyond requirement, she finds a small scuff on his left toe, a dull spot that swallows the light.

"Cadet."

She her head snaps up as her posture coils reflexively.

"I have no need for such a soldier," Treize annunciates frankly. "Male or female."

"I'm a better pilot than either of them," she reminds him, realizing even then that her pointless statement is a frayed-nerved space filler and little more.

Treize recovers the two meters between them with a cool expression that an uninitiated cadet might consider menacing. And while he doesn't quite tower over her, but she's forced to tilt her head up.

"Do you think I am concerned with the combat load? I can neutralize a dozen threats singlehandedly. Bresman and Ferris could stay on the transport and you and I could crush this cell without them. I don't need them. I need you."

"Why?" Noin ventures, both curious and provocative.

"You're smarter, quicker on your feet, and far more in control of your faculties than either of them. You are a born tactical analyst, and I need you to be there for me."

Noin's lips drop into a frown as she considers his words, the weight they bear and transfer onto her virgin shoulders.

"I suggest you look over the Federation debriefings I gave you. Look for a pattern," Treize orders as he turns away from her and retreats back to his Leo's hatch.

She brings her heels together with an audible click. "Sir."

Treize stops and asks over his shoulder, "Are you afraid?"

There's long quiet between them, steeped in the ambient hum of the craft, and Noin feels herself sway minutely. She unlocks her knees.

"Yes."

He doesn't say anything as he crawls back into the cockpit. From within, she hears the familiar tones of the Leo's diagnostics firing up. Long beep, short chirp. Level two scan, auxiliary and safeties. She stares at the open hatch for a few moments before taking it as her dismissal. She doesn't get more than a few meters before she hears him call after her.

"Cadet!"

She spins crisply and barks her acknowledgement.

Treize is half-hanging out of his suit. Clutching the support handle, his bared arm, like the rest of him, is lean and wiry in the way that only a young body will once and never again be. When he speaks, his words are pronounced with precise measure.

"I have never, ever slept with anybody in my direct chain of command. Never. And I never will. I have a bit more sense than that, if you can believe it."

Noin's face warms, and she nods.

"You're dismissed. Get some rack time. You'll need it."

xXx

From her observational position safe within the frontline command center, Noin is the first to catch the movement in Sector 7. With the quick, calm collectedness and precision that landed her the position in operations, she relays the coordinates verbally and electronically to the three Leos that comprise her unit. Behind her, General Septem speaks in a low, angry voice to the man he addresses as Dekim. They don't seem scared enough for the danger they're in. Septem's complaining about lack of 'proper' reinforcements and something about the colony's emergency circuits being offline. She doesn't spare more than a mental nod of acknowledgment of them and their clipped bickering.

The Specials' three Leos form an arced perimeter around the command center, each defending a wide avenue. An entire squad of Federation mobile suits has just been cut down by the rebels in Sector 8, and, per orders, the Specials have intervened as a primary resort masquerading as a last.

They're outnumbered, one of their two disadvantages. But these weaknesses have been a part of Treize's calculation since before they left natural land. He's preemptively compensated by thoroughly briefing his cadets on the layout of the colony and the most likely trajectories of attack as determined by Noin's hours-long analysis of Federation reports of prior engagements. He's done all he can to give them confidence in their unconvincing statistical odds. It seems mostly to have taken with them.

He orders the cadets to hold fast, sensing their desires to engage the rapidly approaching units. He knows how they feel, because he feels it too. His feet weigh heavily on the pedals of his suit, with only a thumb-switch safety resting between agonizing inaction and heart-pounding, elated mobility. He controls himself like the adult and commander they expect him to be. They're too small to stretch thinly, and the model of suit they're up against is the root of their second and greatest disadvantage.

The Tragos suits were originally designed for one purpose: urban engagement. The enemies have at least eight confirmed units, the same units that have browbeaten previous deployments without incurring more than a single irreclaimable loss. They're fast and agile, and while they would be no match for a Leo on Earth, fighting on a colony comes with it a slew of inherent obstacles. Treize knows his Leos will have few response options once combat begins. Firmly instated Corps directives, cranky diplomatic recommendations, and Treize's own personal ethical principles demand a minimization of collateral damage. Leo engines burn hot and hard. They blast windows out of buildings. They throw people and automobiles. Their tactical choices will be frustratingly limited, and he resents Victoria command for their lack of foresight.

Noin calls out a second ground movement, and a total of eight predicted suits now read on Treize's EM sensor. He orders Bresman and Ferris to cover inbound roads A and C, while he stands firm on the main strip. All avenues circle the circumference of the colony, but these three roads that run straight into the command center are broad and wide open, evacuated and inviting. It's then that the nature of the engagement becomes apparent. There will be no surprises, only two forces on direct collision courses. Medieval. The lack of complication is more terror-inspiring than relieving.

Proximity warning. Treize zooms his main camera and captures the five units speeding towards him. He primes his 105 and instructs his cadets to do the same. He reiterates his personal tactic: cut and hold. He dispenses similar advice.

"Do not let them draw you out, no matter what," he reminds them, schooling his tone to convey unflappable self-assuredness that he mostly feels. He didn't make captain in two years by being in the rear with the gear; as a Specials officer of exceptional and well-known talent, he's seen more action than many men with three times his length in service. But still, he feels the clench of fear. It's a good thing, something that's kept him alive in the field since the age of thirteen.

There is a tremble in Bresman's voice when he confirms. Treize tries to remember what it was like to have never seen combat and finds that he can't recall the feeling. Probably dread. Probably doubt. Or was it all smirking, youthful invincibility?

"We will see victory today," he informs them as he grips the thrusters tightly. "Do not fear it. Do not doubt it."

The confirmation is firmer and, perhaps, even a little excited.

The battle rages to the smooth, calm clips of Noin's minute-by-minute updates. The Tragos units are hardy, but the Specials are young, freshly confident, quick, and incomparably well-trained. Treize hopes the rebels realize who they are, that they're different from the others. That they're the future of the Federation. The future of the Earth Sphere.

Everything goes unusually well. Treize mercilessly obliterates the five suits that he engages. Combat high surges through him as he thrusts his beam saber into the torso of the last Tragos to charge him. He slashes to kill, and he slashes to send an unambiguous message: We will destroy you; you cannot win.

The last functioning enemy unit and the command vehicle, both crippled and grinding, make a retreat. Bresman pursues until Treize stops him.

"Leave it," he orders, breathing strained from the brutal physical exertion of MS combat. "Let them go back to their cell." To process their devastating losses. To tell the story. To get angrier and more foolish. Untidy and careless unto annihilation.

EM proximity warning. Treize's brows draw together, and he checks his monitors. It's an OZ signature, and he knows immediately that it's wrong. He zooms in. Standing atop a parking structure is… a child… a child… holding a rocket launcher, aiming with unmistakable intent at the command center. The control room of the command center. There's a heartbeat of wide-eyed hesitation and disbelief, and what follows is a string of thoughts and calculations so blitz-fast that only the unavoidable solution reveals itself.

Move. Fast. Now.

He does. He hears Noin call his name. His hands are iron-gripped on the thrusters and he braces himself for impact. The sound is so loud that it blurs his vision, he's cringing so hard. He's thrown back. His monitors flicker and go black. There's a scream of twisted metal and the shattering of plastic. The popping of electricity. It's an instant that seems to happen for a year.

The warning klaxon sounds. It's a warbling, high-pitched groan. Catastrophic systems failure. His cockpit lights flicker and fade to emergency lighting. He hears his name repeated once, twice, desperately. There's a warm trickle down his face. He opens his eyes and looks at his fried monitors, frames of jagged shards.

There's no question that the move was a success. There's also no question that the missile was OZ-developed for use specifically against OZ-developed mobile suits. What was the model again? OZ-22 Stinger? Or was it the OZ-35 Scorpion? He had seen so little of the launcher, obscured by the impossibility of its wielder. The hit must have been right on the money, right at the vulnerable torso joint, the only way one hand-held rocket could total a Leo. It's an unsettling convergence of factors. Treize wonders if the child reconfigured his aim purposefully. The lucidity of his thoughts doesn't strike him as particularly strange.

He reaches up and feels his forehead. A piece of plastic drops onto his lap as soon as he touches it. His fingertips are smeared with blood.

"Is everyone all right?"

All three cadets, his former students and present comrades, confirm their safety.

"Good," he mutters with a weak and relieved smile. He closes his eyes and lets his head fall back against the headrest.

The twang of the warning alarm buzzes, sputters, and dies into dead silence. Treize takes a deep breath and mechanically unbuckles the harness that's stuck in a dramatic state of most uncomfortable retraction. The release feels like a tremendous exhalation, and as he lets himself slouch, he feels it. A pull on his stomach. His eyes shoot open when his fingertips brush a sharp edge and, looking down, he sees a peak of metal rocket shrapnel – chipped at all sides for maximum damage – sticking out of him. The dark green of his uniform coat is soaking black with thick blood. His mouth opens as he pulls lightly at it and finds it most undeniably stuck in his gut.

As anxiety begins to creep up his neck, he shifts and tries without success to move. He scans further down his torso, past his groin, and regards what has become of his right leg with uncomprehending horror. A thick rod of steel, some structural component of the cockpit, juts tall and dripping-red from his thigh. His flesh is torn open, ripped apart from the violent, explosive speed of steel through mortal tissue. The muscles remind him of blood-soaked, shredded meat, and some twisted part of his mind finds this appropriate because that's exactly what it is.

There's no white left on his upper pant leg, and in the dim of the cockpit it looks like film noir, realism so brutal that it skirts the border of surreal. He lets his fingertip trace the line of the bloody rod until it disappears into a deep mess of gore. The rod is still fixed to its framework, and he's literally pinned – skewered – inside his suit. Treize inhales sharply, painfully, and his hands begin shaking uncontrollably as he comes to a slow, terrible understanding of his predicament.

He hits the comm button and informs Noin as calmly as he can that he'll require an extraction team.

"Sir, can you move?" It's the first time her voice has wavered all day.

"I need a medic…"

"Sir..."

"Yes, Cadet?" His voice is now as steady as his hands. Panic corkscrews into him and compels him to repeatedly smash his fist against the emergency hatch release. He hears a weak mechanical strain. Nothing happens.

"Sir!"

He hears his name, and it sounds like such a strange name to him as he fades into darkness.


	4. Chapter 3

Title: Growing Up – Chapter 3  
Pairing: Treize/Leia  
Warnings: Combat violence, light mutilation of canon, het sexuality/sensuality (nothing too graphic), military stuff.  
See Prologue for notes, specifically regarding the manga.

Note: After posting a couple of chapters, I realized that it might be hard to keep track of the dates since this is a solidly episodic story. So I've added a count to make it a little easier, because the passage of time is more important than the specifics of dates. Sorry for not realizing this earlier.

xXx

(Late September, 188 - Day 0)

He wakes up to florescent light stinging his eyes. There's a moment of mindless absorption before he starts, body jerked upright by an instinct that's not entirely military-bred. There is a surge of pain in his leg. His stomach. He sweats. Cringes. Sees greyblack blooming blotches. Falls back against the inclined mattress.

"You should take it easy," a female voice tells him.

Treize's head rolls to the side until he can see her, standing on the other side of the small room, unfolding a thin, white-knit blanket that she's pulled from a small storage closet. She moves to the foot of his bed and drapes it over his lower half. He's drowsily relieved when he sees that he still has two legs.

"Do you know where you are?"

How could he? How could he possibly? Some things are obvious. He's hooked up, beeping, draining fluids from a couple of bags. He's woozy, the stench of other people's sickness is unmistakable, and the nurse looks like an idiot's caricature, a joke at a costume party. For all Treize knows, he's crossed over to another dimension.

"You're in the Barton Family Medical Center. My father had it built for his workers."

She's petite and smooth, her face a neutral mask, like a doll one might place in the passenger seat to abuse a commuter lane. Her wrists, he notes, are tiny as she manually turns the dial on the drip chamber of his smaller IV. He could grab one tight enough to break it, he's sure, even like he is. How long had the IV drip been automated? At least fifteen times as long as Treize's age. He knows then that he must still be on-colony.

"Your father…" He grasps with the syrupy effort of a man just out of emergency surgery. L-3. Money. Triple-Nine. Workers. But he's wading through fog too thick for clarity.

"My name is Leia. My schedule is on the board." She points to a small white board near the door that has two nurses' names and shift times: Leia, 0600 – 1800; Nils, 1800-0600. "Nils and I are the only ones working the floor this week, so I hope you enjoy predictability."

Treize grunts, feeling marrow-deep disinterest toward her, mystery Nils, and their schedules. He's so tired, and it's worse than a triple shift on lockdown. Worse than the sleepless pulled-taffy days of war games, days that stretch and stretch, seeming never to end, until, with a soft, thready tear, the coast seems clear enough to collapse in a damp lean-to with some other smelly soldier. He could be there. On Earth. Autumn leaves under his chin. Rain. Rain tapping and trickling through the trees, down the window...

"It's raining." His voice is a gritty croak. He intended for an upward inflection, to beg the questions 'how' and 'why,' for he has three weeks of the weather schedule memorized. His hand slowly creeps down to his thigh, the thigh that he'd last seen a butchered, gory mess. The area is thick with wraps that feel rough against his fingertips. He touches over where he knows the wound is, an instinctive knowledge, a black, buried smear of something's-not-right. He presses down. The pain blanks his vision and he sucks a breath in through his teeth.

"Your great general made the whole colony rain to control one small fire. While we only have one treatment plant open."

He feels the tangible creep of morphine as it edges into his consciousness, buffing away the tension. He lets go, lets his limbs go limp, lets his neck relax. The words sighed from the corner of his mouth are thoughtless, untempered honesty.

"Not my general."

Leia tilts her head, the first indication given that she's not a robot mannequin. "Oh?"

Treize's eyes drift closed. "That idiot."

Though, in truth, he likes the sound of the rain.

Xxx

(Late September 188 - Day 0 + 3)

Leia rolls a metal cart into his room, one with a squeaky wheel and an impractically wide turning radius. He opens his heavy eyelids and thinks he's watching her unnoticed. Her skinny arms float as she sets aside a roll of bandages and mixes water and antiseptic concentrate in a rectangular plastic container not unlike the one he vaguely remembers quietly vomiting into at some point he can't quite recall. Treize isn't sure how many days he's been in the hospital, and he remembers to ask at all the wrong times.

Yesterday Noin visited him, without Bresman and Ferris but with their regards. She didn't stay long, just long enough to exchange clumsy pleasantries and wishes for swift recovery. He stopped her before she could thank him, just on the cusp of sincere gratitude lanced with newfound hero worship. Stymied, denied a vent, she put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. It was a gesture beyond any expectation he had of her visit. And then he slipped, words cascading, and told her he was proud of her, a planned expression turned careless with a foreign infusion of honest-to-God respect. When her eyes welled up, she wiped her nose with the back of her hand in a gesture that was childish and unselfconscious. Hadn't they fought in battle together? Weren't they now equals? Yes, he supposed as he heard her booted steps recede down the hallway. They had. They were.

"Legs, head, or stomach first?" Leia asks, squeezing the bandages in her hand. She regards him with a smile that seems perpetually fixed. It's thin. Controlled. Carefully noncommittal. It indicates neither joy nor sarcasm.

"May as well work your way down," Treize replies, unsure of why she gives him the option, because he's certain there must be some sort of official procedure guiding these decisions. He doesn't appreciate having the choice, and he wonders if she offers because she thinks the opposite.

She takes a seat on the edge of his bed. He fairly certain she's not supposed to be doing this either, but he doesn't really mind. She's pleasant enough and always smells good, like fabric softener. When she removes the bandage from his forehead, he sees no blood on it.

"This is healing well," she says, inspecting the stitches. "With a little more attention, the mark should be small." She wets a cotton square with the antiseptic and pats it against the wound. As she does, Treize looks down her arm and catches a peek of her cotton bra through the loose short sleeve of her uniform dress.

"Good," he mutters.

She arranges a new bandage and traces her index fingertips along the four adhesive sides of it, pressing it down firmly. Her eyes, light blue and mild, meet his, light up, and for an instant, her lips purse into a smile that conveys amusement. It's gone before he can ask why without sounding paranoid. He feels her hands on the side tie of his hospital gown, pulling then spreading across his flinching stomach. She observes discretion in a sterile, professional way that indicates training more than consideration.

"Are you still feeling sick?" she asks as she peels back the bandage that covers the mended gash in his stomach. Her glance up at him is quick and expectant.

"It's better," he lies tensely. Her fingers touch for a fraction too long, whisper-light, and he holds his breath.

Leia inspects the dirty bandage for hints of discoloration and, finding none, makes simple work of replacing it. She then rises to her feet and waits with turned back for him to situate himself so she can tend to his last wounds. It's a young routine, still rusty, still awkward and painful and humiliating. He exhales harshly as he positions his right leg as previously instructed. It hurts like hell, and there must be an easier way to do it, he thinks, but there's something real about it, and it's one of the only ways he has left of demonstrating control. When she turns back, his gown is pulled up and strategically bunched to preserve what he reserves as the last shred of his dignity.

She's very careful as she unravels the dressing, her movements smooth and maternal and all-knowing. Treize exerts an unnecessary effort to keep at bay the shaking of his hands. He grabs at sheets, an occupation that seems superior to letting himself tremble. It's a difficult position to hold, foot flat on the bed, knee bent, thigh completely off the mattress. Every muscle he never thought he had in his leg is bunched and straining with hot pain. He hopes he doesn't pass out like he did the day before.

She pulls the anterior bandage off, and even though he's prepared himself, his stomach still heaves like it does every time he sees what's become of his leg. It amplifies the discomfort, and his mouth fills with saliva.

The wound is a deep, oblong, bloody flesh-crater of approximately 20 centimeters in diameter, extending from right above his knee cap to mid-thigh. It's larger and more bowl-like than it was in the cockpit, the result of multiple sessions of surgical debridement. Rather than the saturated pulled-pork mess that he saw before, images of which still assault him at odd times, the wound looks smooth, cleaned up, pink and healthy, bedded in a wide rectangle of skin that the nurse's aid shaves daily with a small, gleeful smirk on her lips. The entry wound on the outside of his thigh is smaller but just as bottomless. Treize muses with disgust that he could stick something through one wound and have it pop out the other.

He swallows hard. "You're not going to leave it like that, are you?" he asks with a nervy huff, tracking her every incremental movement with dilated, unblinking eyes.

One of the few saving graces was that the beam missed both his femur and femoral artery. 'A miracle,' the doctor told him the day before as he flipped through his paper – paper – chart. 'A fluke,' Treize countered bitterly as he wondered if these people even knew what a computer was.

Leia doesn't look up at him. Her focus narrows, and he cries out sharply when she pokes her gloved fingers into the wound, inspecting for discoloration and secretions indicative of infection. She withdraws her hand and says 'I'm sorry' in a breathy way that is purely apologetic.

"We're expecting synthetic muscle grafts to arrive from Jerusalem tomorrow." Her voice sounds distant, but not uncertain. It's then that her tone changes, sharpens, and hones momentarily to a fine cutting point. "Funny that when a Federation soldier needs something, things move remarkably quickly from Earth."

He doesn't really care about the attack. Barely registers it. Dimly decides that he might believe it. He closes his eyes and lets out a long, tremulous breath.

"I'm going to clean them now. Are you ready?"

Treize nods and imagines he's somewhere else. Nowhere specific. Maybe his office. His quarters. His bedroom at home. Being scolded by his mother. Yelling at a soldier for stepping out of line. Desperately trying – and failing – to talk Zechs out of applying to Lake Victoria. Any of those miserable scenarios sounds better than antiseptic solution being sucked into a large, needle-less syringe.

"Tell me what else," he murmurs.

"You'll go back into surgery, and the doctor will graft the muscle into your wounds so that they will eventually fill in."

She squirts the solution along the contours of the injury and gently blots out the excess liquid with an absorbent pad. Treize presses his lips together and grimaces soundlessly.

"We'll pump you full of steroids and wait a bit to see if the graft takes." Leia touches his knee and urges him to roll his leg in so that she can tend the entry site on the side. "Once we can safely assume there's no rejection, you'll go back into surgery once more. The doctor will take skin from the outside of your left thigh and graft it over the wounds on your right leg."

There's a minute or two of tight silence as she cleans and sops up the smaller hole. She starts talking again when she sees his jaw clench once, twice, hard enough to pull his mouth into a pained sneer. "You'll be on pain medication as needed, and you'll be required to inject the surrounding muscles with a regenerative formula that will induce local muscle growth."

Leia bandages and dresses his injuries quickly, stealing glances of concern at the young man, the almost boy, who's pressing the right side of his face into his pillow as if to bury himself in it. She then carefully coaxes him to lower his leg.

"Are you all right, Treize?"

His red-rimmed eyes crack open to the sound of his name, the first time she's used it. His already pale skin is blanched, and he tastes wet salt on his upper lip.

"Yes."

She stands and smooths out the wrinkles in her thickly-woven dress with her child's hands. She gazes down at him and grasps lightly onto the bar intended to prevent him from spilling out of bed. "So long as your body doesn't reject the grafts, you should return to full functionality," she tells him. "Cosmetically, the graft sites will appear slightly discolored, and the surface will likely be a bit lumpy due to the way the muscle grafts are likely to occupy the empty space. There will be scarring."

"But I will run again," he tries to confirm. He has to, because career depends on it, and he needs to know if this is a fight he should even take up. If it's not... he doesn't even want to think about that possibility.

"That's up to you – your dedication to your physical therapy regimen. If you want to run again, if you work for it, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to." There's a hint of something weaker than doubt in her voice, like she's breached the perimeter that separates her professional knowledge from a layman's speculations. "In the meantime, we'll give you some crutches and you'll be hobbling back to your unit in no time flat." Of that, at least, she seems reasonably certain.

Treize immediately hates the idea of going back, hotly and passionately, and he doesn't understand why. He touches at the cotton square taped to his head, then up and into his greasy hair.

"How many days has it been?"

"They brought you in on Monday morning. It's Thursday." Her eyes dart to the digital clock on his bedstand and she jerks her chin towards it.

He follows her direction and stares in fuzzy disbelief. How had he missed the date displayed so clearly and literally right in front of his face? What an embarrassing lapse in observational skills. Unacceptable. The kind of carelessness that gets people killed in combat. The kind of carelessness that makes him wince with disdain. The kind of carelessness he is bent to hell and back on conditioning out of every man and woman that he bears even the slightest responsibility to train.

But the concern is fleeting, like a log adrift in a current of opium.

"You should be fair to yourself," Leia comments as she observes the nuances of his facial expression. She's not yet sure how to read this one, but she's learning. Like a scientist, she tests him against herself, because every patient's different. Some need affection. Some need quiet. Some need witless conversation. This one... This one she's still trying to figure out. "You've been hopped up on goofballs this entire time."

"Still," he complains, though not without finding a modicum of floaty, undignified humor in her phrasing. "That's pretty bad." His eyelids droop and his head sinks even deeper into the pillow that smells like mothballs. "I should have – "

She touches her fingers to his forearm, softly, gently. "You should let yourself rest."

xXx

(Early October 188. Day 0 + three weeks)

It's night. Or, at least, that is what's been dictated by Central Weather. The colony runs on London time, a Barton nationalistic decision that is conveniently also Zulu time, which is different from L2-V08744, which is different from L5-A0206. A colony's refusal to run on Zulu is a brand of individuality deemed almost universally obnoxious by any transportation operation, business enterprise, or military contingent that has a schedule – which is to say, all of them.

But that, it's been determined by those Earth-born, is the colonies. Independence. Pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps. So much more so than even the most zealously capitalist nations on the planet. The Europe he's left behind is certain that it's moved beyond the self-serving free-for-all, voluntarily united (with a pair of woeful exceptions) under the Federation, the trigger-happy child of the EU. Uniting the Continent even closer is Romefeller and, inseparably, OZ, which have Europe steel-stitched at every seam through political networking so quiet and deep that they're bound not even to be publicly sensed until, like a metastatic cancer, it's too powerful to be stopped. Treize's Russia has never quite settled with it, the alliance, the call for submissive interdependence. It's sprawled and squirming against being cornered by the West and China, but it's by no means L2. No L5. No riotous bastard with something to prove

The light is nothing like the moon. How is it that they don't know that? It's right outside the door. How many of them have never been to Earth? How many have never seen the sun rise above the horizon? Certainly they've seen it peek out from behind Earth's black shadow, but it's hardly the same.

Treize thinks these things, these dull, pointless, and narrow thoughts, because he exhausted and can't sleep. He misplaces the blame on the old woman down the hall who's been moaning low for two hours and forty-three minutes. It's a sound that's held by the shape of the hallway and carried with unfortunate clarity to his room. Her voice distracts him from himself, from real thoughts, from personal thoughts, for which he's oddly grateful. He wonders what's wrong with her, whether Nils hears her and intends to do anything about it.

He touches his leg. His first combat wound doesn't feel like he expected it would. He's not proud of it. The defect feels alien. He wonders if it will ever heal, knowing full well that it probably will, and he frowns in the knowledge that his legs will never look like they once did. Not like last year. Last month. Battle – glorious battle, the qualitative and quantitative measure of bravery, the currency of soldierly respect – has warped him into a damaged thing. No, he's not proud at all. He wonders if all those combat-hardened limpers of his father's generation were proud, the ones who would spend hours in his father's study, filling the room with smoke of three kinds and drinking late into the night. Untouchables. Men of Honor. Were they proud?

Treize runs his finger along the perimeter of the gape in his leg. He could find it in his sleep, even buried under layers of thick dressing. He'll get a medal for this. Like the men in his father's study, a dozen or more jangling when they wore them in full dress, which they usually did, maybe because they were so heavy. How stupid of him to have coveted such an encumbrance.

The woman stops moaning – abruptly, as if she had a switch regulating the sound. Treize's eyes flit frantically from side to side in the dark silence, and he strains for a whisper, the beep of a monitor, anything. At the nurse's station, Nils clears his throat, and Treize feels himself relax, but only a little.

He often thinks about leaving. Randomly. Without clearance. He fantasizes about walking out like none of this ever happened. Without a limp. Without so many extra holes in his body. He imagines walking away all of the hours of his life he's wasted sitting in front of his computer. He should have walked more. He wouldn't mind dissolving into the colony-city, washing out, becoming a nobody. Another Earth import. Another aloof ex-pat with a funny accent.

But Triple-Nine isn't Bali. It isn't Milan or Paris or London or New York. It's a rough loop of barely-contained ballistic excitation. It's cinder-colored. It's perpetually a shortage away from evacuation. It's broke and broken. It's no place for an aristocratic soldier, a bred conservative with a brash streak of questionably sane idealism, an old-money only son of dubiously Continental sensibilities who has at all times at least one relative quietly in incarceration and another in a scandalous relationship with the absolutely wrong type of person. It's no place for Treize Khushrenada, and maybe that's what he finds most enticing.

He thinks he should probably go home, but he's snagged on the inability to stomach talking to his mother. Worse is the thought of seeing her face, the heart-mauling concern she'll try to stuff back behind a levy of blasé. He's already refused five of her calls, to the point where she's stopped calling altogether. She must understand, and yet, he doesn't think she ever really could.

It's too quiet. He very softly hums a song Ferris was listening to on the transport to L3. It's obnoxious and infectious. He can only remember one line, and you gotta keep driving, driving, driving on and on, because the road ahead ain't smooth and it is long. He thinks that those might be the worst lyrics he's ever heard, the most absurdly, nauseatingly apropos. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine how good it would feel to drive a drill bit through his left temple, if only to forget he ever heard it.


	5. Chapter 4

Title: Growing Up – Chapter 4  
Pairing: Treize/Leia  
Warnings: Combat violence, light mutilation of canon, het sexuality/sensuality (nothing too graphic), military stuff.  
See Prologue for notes.

Thank you so much for the support, LH! You make me a very happy little Khalani!

xXx

(Late October, 188 – Day 0 + four weeks)

Wobbling and straining, Treize presses his armpits down into the underarm pads of his crutches to balance himself as he holds his duffel bag upside down over his bed.

Nils, dressed in white scrubs that make him look like a psych ward escapee, brought it in at the end of his shift. When asked where he got it, he answered with a shrug that some Wheelie hoisted it onto the reception desk with nothing so polite even as a greeting. 'Wheelie?' was Treize's obvious question, answered with a condescending sputter by Nils tracing the shape of a spoked wheel on his left shoulder, the likeness of which he guessed was a colony. The insignia patch of the Federation Colonial Task Force. 'You wear one?' Nils asked, visibly relieved when Treize shook his head. Treize was not oblivious to the irony of Nils' relief, for his own unit patch was affiliated with OZ, a far more terrifying and insidious organization than the Federation could even fantasize of being.

From the duffel, a cascade of clothing, boots, and miscellany falls into a mountainous pile. He tosses the nylon bag aside and digs through the things that have been packed and sent to him from his unit. Uniforms: two, combat and garrison. One side of his upper lip curls up when he finds no civilian clothes, of which he has over half a closet full, perfectly within reach of anybody digging through his things. Books: three, creased, already read, all unremarkable. Toiletry bag: one, much anticipated razor forgotten. Laptop: one, with a hand-written note wedged between the two halves. Treize snatches it out and lets the computer fall into the pile.

"CPT Khushrenada,

Contact me as soon as you receive this message. Instructions to follow.

LTC Renzetti."

Renzetti. Treize sighs. And then he reads it again, again and again until his fingers tighten and clench the sheet into a furious wad. He shoots it into a nearby garbage can, too angry to be pleased with his aim. But even still, fuming so hotly that he can't even move, he feels that irritating tug, something like duty but without a lick of the pride. He can't do anything but what he knows he has to do, even if doing it makes him feel pathetic.

If he's going to call his commander – if he _has_ to call his commander - he decides that he cares enough to put on his combat uniform top over his gown, because he cares enough to at least pretend that he's perfectly fine, that he's not livid and that he doesn't feel like a used up napkin. He shrugs off his robe, a nice one, one that actually keeps him warm, one Leia brought him last week, and wriggles into a wrinkled t-shirt with no small amount of pulling on the stitches at his stomach.

"Running away?"

Treize whips around as deftly as he can on a bad leg with two crutches that he hasn't at all grown accustomed to moving with. Leia's in the doorway, and it's in relation to his standing height that he gets a full sense of her diminutive stature.

He gives her a thin smile that's entirely forced. "I have to contact my commander. Assuming I can get a signal from here."

"You should be able to now. And certainly he wouldn't mind the way you were," she presses as she takes a few steps into the room. Her tennis shoes, crisply white, carry her silently. She reminds him of a little white ghost. "You are still in the hospital."

"You're right. I do not think he would care, but I do." He searches her eyes for understanding. Did it make any sense to her, or was his world – his thinking - just that nonsensical to perfectly intelligent and rational civilians?

She tilts her head and smiles widely enough to show white teeth. "Do you honestly think that he doesn't know?"

"Know what?" he mumbles as he sits on the edge of the bed and rolls the bedside table in front of himself.

"That you're human."

"I don't really care what he thinks he knows." He combs through his hair with his fingers, thankful for having quite literally suffered through a shower that morning. "Do you have a mirror?"

"No. You look fine."

"Fine."

Leia's grinning now. "Yes, fine."

"Really."

"What am I supposed to say? Would you like me to lie?" She reaches for the uniform blouse folded over the end of the bed and hands it to him. "I'm sorry to tell you, Lieutenant, but this stay's been working against certain elements."

His glare is dulled by a sheen of exhaustion. He points to the rank on the collar of his uniform. "Captain."

"You're skinny."

"Your food is the worst shit I've ever eaten," Treize retorts, immediately wishing he could replace 'shit' with something less immature. He busies himself with buttons, removing himself from himself by idly wondering if a zipper wouldn't be more efficient. Certainly there's a tactical risk of being heard in close ground combat, but how often does one disrobe in the field outside of camp? Would it diminish the gravity, to know that any malefactor could half-undress a soldier with the clever flick of a wrist...?

"Then you should leave, shouldn't you?" she replies without cruelty, courting his attention. "You're free to go at any time. I'm surprised you haven't left already. You obviously hate it here."

He sets the computer on the table and starts it up. "This is the first sign I've received that my unit even remembers my existence," he grinds out bitterly. He slides his legs together lest he give her more of an eyeful than he suspects she would want. "Were it up to me - first off, I never would have come here – but considering that an unavoidable, I would have left as soon as I was mobile."

"You wouldn't have been able to go home, anyway. The shuttle ports were closed for three weeks."

The sour look on Treize's face is very suddenly pulled into brilliant, bright-eyed surprise. "Closed? For what?"

"Terrorists rigged the port door motors with explosives. But not before they blew out the inter-orbital transmitters so that we couldn't call for help."

"They didn't have replacements?" It feels so easy now as a flood of calm cools his blood. It's profound relief, a quelling of a clinging, slow-brewing fear that he had actually been abandoned, forsaken, or – worse than anything - forgotten by his command. By Earth itself. It makes sense now, most of it, and the sense makes him feel a little bit stupid. But only a little.

"They already used their replacements," Leia tells him, the pleasant ring of her voice chilling to a thin layer of distant ice. "The last time this happened."

"They're good," Treize says under his breath.

"No. They're not."

He begins scanning the area for wireless signals. When he speaks again, it's with the unusual buoyancy of hugely pregnant curiosity. "Don't you ever wonder?"

"You were in such terrible shape when they brought you in," Leia recalls, dodging, rerouting the conversation as she mindlessly starts pulling items from the mess he dumped at the foot of the bed. "There was blood everywhere. I've never seen anything like it. And yours wasn't the first torn-up body I've seen." She begins organizing, distractedly sorting his things.

"It has been a bad year. On all of the colonies."

"Doctor Cavanaugh almost took your leg, you know."

Treize's finger pauses over the mouse pad. He thought he'd only dreamed that part. "Did he?"

"Fortunately, he was stupid enough to announce it, so it became a matter of him verses three nurses, one EMT, an aide, and the soldier who came in with you, the young girl who visited you that first week." She smiles as she hand-presses a crease into the leg of his dress uniform trousers as she folds them. "She must be very fond of you, because she was barking at him like a drill instructor, yelling things like 'You fix that leg, you lazy son of a bitch!' until someone called security and had her escorted to the waiting room."

"Did she?" A deep frown etches hard lines into his face. His finger is still hovering, his eyes glazed. He remembers that, Noin's voice, yelling, like a voice through water, hard and edged with impatience and disbelief and anger. He remembers like he remembers his very young childhood, a montage of snapshots, dim and muffled - the sound of a licensed physician wanting to cut off his leg because it would be less hassle than trying to fix it. Because it would be simpler...

"Treize?"

He slowly fades back into the present and tries with partial success to redirect his attention to picking up a network signal. "I've had better physicians."

"Nobody wants to come here. For nurses, there was nobody. That's why I volunteered. It was supposed to be temporary, just until they found a replacement." She's got all of Treize's clothes and things arranged neatly in coordinating piles. He watches out of the corner of his eye as she fusses with them, stacking his terrible books precisely, tucking the laces into his boots. Small, nervous, fidgety movements.

"I didn't even have time to finish the coursework," she continues. "It started when the cell activated. It started with protests. When they became violent, people started leaving. Good people. Professionals. They thought it would be different here."

"I don't know why. Wherever the Federation goes, violence follows."

"The rebels start it. They always do. They destroy our property, steal our equipment, cost millions of credits of damage..." She abruptly turns away from the bed, strides across the room, and yanks open the curtains to let the artificial daylight in. "... And then they complain about not having any money, about being the working poor, when it's they who've scared all the businesses away."

"You didn't have to do that."

She spins around and freezes. "What?"

He nods to the neurotically arranged items to his left. "I'm just going to put everything back in my bag again."

There's a tone then, a light, dancing chime from his laptop.

"There's your signal," she notes as she perches on the arm of the upholstered visitor's chair next to the window.

He has it, but it's slow and weak. He types in an IP pulled from memory. As the request travels to Earth, he eyes her from over the top of his computer. She anticipates his next words.

"May I stay?" she asks, her voice a soft plea.

His lips thin as he devises untrue reasons why it wouldn't be allowed, confidentiality or something as vague, but resignedly settles with honesty. "If you think it will interest you."

She nods and stays quiet until Renzetti's static-garbled voice picks up on the other end.

"Who is this?" The screen is black, the connection too frail to carry visuals colony-side.

"Captain Khushrenada, Sir."

"Treize!" Like projectile vomit, his words spew out in a rush. "God, I thought we were going to have to drill a hole in the side of that rig and throw down a message in a bottle or something, because that colony – let me tell you – that colony you're on is Fucked with a capital eff. I don't even know why they're bothering to finish it, 'cause the rebels are just going to blow it up anyway. And what's with this signal? You got a bunch of people standing side-by-side with wire hangers or something?"

His face grows hot at his commander's comments. He dares a glance up and finds Leia's face emotionless to the extent that it appears the product of great effort.

"Communications from this Lagrange Point are particularly vulnerable to Van Allen distortion, Sir," Treize makes up, trusting that the bulk of Renzetti's astrophysics coursework left his mind a decade-and-a-half ago.

"That right?" The sound cuts out. "- got orders from Med Com. You're in the black hold."

"Convalescent leave?" Treize translates. He tries to shift his weight to his left side, off of his steadily aching leg, while maintaining his posture. "For how long?"

"As long as you need. Within reason, of course. But from what I hear, you ------ up pretty bad."

"I will be fine."

"Good to hear." There's a vocal sigh on Renzetti's end. "Didn't expect this from your instructor tour, did you?"

He hasn't expected a lot of the things that have happened to him, including the distaste in the back of his throat at the sound of Renzetti's voice. He always at least had a little respect for the man, for proving himself capable enough to make such high rank at a young age, but even that small allowance seems too much. The words he may have once found conciliatory, chummy, and agreeable now seem arrogant and idiotic. Ignorant. Ridiculous, like the words of a small, uneducated brat.

"Hey, listen up," he continues without awaiting Treize's response. Treize then imagines his commander leaning forward in his chair, stooping at the shoulders to rest his forearms on his desk and thread his fingers together. It's one of his signature moves, something Treize has seen so many times from so many field-grade officers that he wonders if it's not taught at the Advanced Officer Training Course. "You're a hero here. All over the nets. The soldier who saved General Septem and crushed those rebel idiot fucks."

He looks over at Leia again. Impossibly, she's smiling now, and he's not certain what part of Renzetti's comment she finds amusing, or if it's really amusement at all.

"It would have been a failed mission without the cadets," Treize says, stating the obvious, without taking his eyes off of her. "I hope Colonel Llewellyn awards them special commendation."

"Oh, they're getting preferential assignment, meritorious service medals, talking early promotion, all that. And, of course, you will be -------ing special commendation from Field Marshal Noventa himself. That and your Brighting for your injury, and, of course, you get another tick for having successfully engaged hostile anti-Federation operatives. I'm sure this'll give you enough points to make major this year, and General Singh is putting your name in for the Medal of Valor, which is pretty much the most --- certainly deserve --- thing to ask of you."

Treize's already weak interest begins to float away as the awards tally swirls slowly in his head. It's too much. Too soon. Considering the last month, the alienation, the complete communications blackout, the doubt... such an onslaught of accolade seems almost like a practical joke.

"Go ahead, Renzetti."

There's a pause on the other end, a moment of disbelief at the impatient, disrespectful informality of the address that quickly gets chalked up to a signals interruption. "You need to be debriefed. A report will suffice. Just shoot it to my mailbox…"

xXx

(Later that day)

Sliding on his uniform pants is embarrassingly difficult, but only because the pain is putting him on edge. The dressing, extremely thick to keep in place delicately laid skin grafts, is coming unbound. He lowers his head between his legs and puts his palm to his forehead until the wave of nausea and dizziness passes. Through the haze of his body's revolt, there's a knock at his door.

"What?" Treize snaps.

"May I come in?"

He sits up with a grimace and carefully maneuvers the waistband of his pants over his bandages with a skill that seems instantaneously divined upon him. "No. Hold on."

When he's straightened out, tucked in, buttoned and zipped up, he pushes himself to his feet with his crutches and gives Leia permission to enter.

She's sharp in slim black slacks and a chocolate-colored sweater in what he recognizes as cashmere. She is in this moment the antithesis of her work image. Sleek. Sophisticated. Rich. There's a difference between being wealthy and being rich, between being him and being her, and Leia Barton embodies it. It's the 8,000 credit purse that looks like it's been used as a punching bag. It's the way the leather of her designer boots is unpolished. It's the absolute security and righteous set in her stance, her smile, her eyes. He sees and determines all of this the moment she walks through the door, before she even greets him.

"You look well," she comments as she folds her arms over her chest.

"Surely you know why."

"It hasn't been so bad here, has it?"

A beat of silence spreads between them. For the first time in the four weeks of his recuperation, his smile is genuine. "Aside from almost losing my leg to a lunatic and being bored to the point of contemplating self-lobotomization to alleviate it, no. I suppose it hasn't."

"The next shuttle leaves in two hours," she tells him, her gaze drifting to his half-empty duffel bag. "For Montreal. I hope that's okay. I thought maybe we could grab some lunch in the meantime."

Treize's smile dissolves into a flat line. "I'm not going back."

Leia shakes her head with a lopsided grin of cheerful disbelief. "What? Why?"

"I need to think."

"About what?" comes her quiet, serious question.

He opens his mouth to answer, but it's too young to put into words. It's there, though, thrumming through his mind, shades of light and very black. He needs to think. Maybe about everything. He limps forward on his crutches, past Leia, and stops in front of the window.

"I think I am going to stay here," he says as he looks down at the street below. The traffic is gridlocked. Down the avenue he sees the signal light flashing red. Even through the plate glass window, he hears sirens, out there, down there. Then he's out there and down there too, on the ground looking back up at himself from below, straining to see what he looks like now that he's no longer settled with anything.

"Can you do that?"

"I can do what I like."

"Are you going to stay in Federation lodging?"

Treize snorts as he pictures open sleeping bays twenty men deep and stall-free communal showers. "Good God, no."

"Then where will you go?"

His eyes, soft with loose thoughts, track over the buildings and buildings that grow inward from the wide, arching rim of the colony. So unlike where he's come from. Absolutely unlike anywhere he's ever been. He realizes then that he's been inside far too long, so long that he doesn't even know what colonial air tastes like.

"There must be a flat for rent somewhere," he says, more to himself than Leia. "A hotel, even."

"You could stay with me."

His attention stretches even further out, along the loop of paired sectors, up and up until it can't see city anymore, just that incredible arc. Her offer processes somewhere behind the dull point in his brain that registers the constant burning ache of physical pain. He doesn't turn it into a cost-benefit analysis. Instead, his mind shrugs. Why not? Almost any reason would be good enough. As long as he can be left alone. As long as he's far away from Renzetti, adulterous cretin, and everything men like him love about order and honor and pride and The Mission. Enough. Enough of all that, he thinks.

"I have some space," Leia continues with tentativeness that's sweet, rubbing absently at her elbow. "I live alone. I have a couple of spare bedrooms. You'd get your own full bath. And it's very near by. It's in Sector 2. They even have a cinema down the - "

"I don't want to intrude," he perfunctorily offers.

"I think that's my determination to make, don't you?" She drops her hands to her sides and resituates her purse when it slides down her shoulder. "It's only an offer. As you said, you can do what you like." She stands tall then, as tall as she can get, and squares her chin. "But if you do accept, you have to answer one question."

"What's that?"

"Are you accepting?"

"That depends on the question."

"All right." Leia pauses and watches him for a breath. The slouch of his shoulders, the careless lean against the wall, the expressionless void of a face that could be called handsome were there any trace of passion in it. "Why here? Why this colony?"

"I accept." Treize presses his forehead to the window. It's cool, and his breath condenses on the glass. "And the answer is that Poland gets very cold in the winter."

xXx

'Some space,' Treize discovers, is a gross understatement. Leia's place is an expansive penthouse apartment atop the tallest residential structure in the sector. It's brand new, decorated professionally using strict modern and minimalist directives. She shows him to his room, which is angled and impersonal. He likes it immediately.

"You'll want some different clothes, I assume," Leia comments as she watches him hang his dress uniform in the closet.

As much as Treize likes to believe he's his own man, beyond conditioning and secretly winking at the tricks and crafts of the military's training and indoctrination programs, some routines have embedded themselves too deeply, beyond thought, beyond choice. And it's not until he's buttoned all the buttons and smoothed the collar, until his uniform looks just as perfect on the hanger as it does on him, the picture of dignified respectability, that he realizes what he's been doing with the last two-and-a-half minutes of his life.

"You can have someone send your things," she suggests.

After a moment of bothered consideration, he crutches to the dresser and purposefully angles his body between Leia and the underwear he's unpackaging and putting away. It's the horrible kind, the blindingly white, brandless issue kind packaged in sets of three, the kind that is supposedly invisible underneath white dress uniform breeches but really isn't. Everybody knows you have to buy Boucher brand, because it's the only kind that doesn't leave lines. Everyone knows that. The person who packed his bag certainly must have known that.

"I want to do some shopping" Treize says to her as he slides the drawer closed. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the dresser. Tired, dull eyes framed in a pale, wan face look back.

"I always order from Earth. They're building retail stores down the street – I think they're even putting in a Merced & Dominico – but the money's tied, so the developer suspended construction."

"What's the shipping time?" he asks, turning away from his own miserable appearance, turning back to Leia, who looks fresh and warm and healthy.

She pauses, knowing he won't like her answer, and takes a light bite at her lower lip. "Two weeks, assuming everything's quiet."

Assuming the shuttle ports haven't been sabotaged. Assuming the rebels haven't hacked into Federation security and stolen access codes, uniforms, passes, vehicles, whatever. Assuming they haven't gone to every length imaginable, with no thought of personal safety, to scream their injustice and frustration with every resource they can land their desperate fingertips on.

Treize's forked brows slowly rise, but it's not a factor of disbelief on the topic of colonial logistics. It's because he begins to wonder...

"Pretend you're in the field. At least you'll have plenty of undies."

"Yes."

He wonders.

"I could never be a soldier."

He wonders: Why didn't he think about this before? Any of this?

"I think you would surprise yourself."

Why didn't he care about this before? He was supposed to – weren't they all supposed to? But he didn't, really. Not before. And they didn't, either. Not his commanders. Not top brass. Not his uncle or his father or his colleagues. None of them cared. All of them should have. They were obligated to care – at the very least, to know. Really know.

"I would cry the first time somebody yelled at me."

Why didn't he see this before?

"Every soldier has cried at least once."

The colonists. The colonies.

"Even you?"

They're amazing. They're just...

"Once."

Incredible.

"Are you hungry?"

There's a sharp break in his train of thought, a swift kick of queasiness in his stomach at the mention of food. The doctor had the gall to tell him that it was in his head, and Treize promptly reminded him that he was run through the gut by a shard of shrapnel as long as his hand. The doctor – not even the same son of a bitch who wanted to take his leg – then said he was having 'traumatic resonance,' and Treize told him to wank off, that he didn't need some hack pseudo-quack trying to psychoanalyze him, make him think he was crazy and ruined and weak.

He'd never spoken like that to anybody in his entire life. Not sober, anyway.

"Whether I am or not, I think eating is one of my higher priorities now."

"Are you allergic to anything? Avoidant?"

Treize rests his crutches against the dresser. "No. I'm not picky."

She leaves him then. He rushes to sit on the edge of the bed, head swimming from a sudden surge of pain, and falls back. His leg is on fire, and he's completely, debilitatingly unsure of what he's doing with himself. His head rolls to the left. Outside the window are those buildings and buildings, between which are rectangular, underdeveloped plots of green that might one day look like the ones on L1-B49001.

If the colony doesn't implode by then.

The curve of it strikes him as grand, magnificent, a marvel of engineering and tenacity. The traffic now flows like an uninterrupted trail of ants. Only a month ago he was on those streets, fighting rebels who only wanted a chance to get the Federation as good as they were had in 175 by OZ. But there's no way to pay that back. And because of this, they will never stop. Not for anyone. Not for the Bartons, not for the Federation, not for anyone. Not until the Federation issues a unilateral withdrawal order – perhaps not even until the Federation ceases to exist. And once they figure out that the Federation is only part of the problem, how far will it go? He wonders.

The five colonists he killed last month - didn't they know that they never had a chance? It had been easy, thwaka-thwaka-thwaka, like in the simulator. He had no anger towards them, not like they had towards him.

Somehow, it didn't seem fair.

xXx

Treize wakes to the feel of the mattress dipping. His deep blue eyes slide open to look up at the face that stares down at him with that careful neutrality, a grey wall that begins to slide away the moment his gaze meets hers.

"Why are you a soldier?" Leia asks. Quietly, so quietly that he can barely hear her. Her hand, ringed on two insignificant fingers, rests hear his temple, supporting some of her weight as she sits.

She has large eyes. Too large for her personality, too innocent for the well-formed opinions she has. Her hair, he's surprised to find, is straightened, flat-ironed and fine. Her chocolate sweater has been replaced by one of winter white. He lifts his wrist and checks his chronometer.

"Why did you let me sleep so long?" comes his grumbled counter-question. His legs are still dangling off the bed. He's still in his jump boots.

"My question first," she reminds him softly.

He scrubs his hands over his face with a long sigh. "I don't know," he says into his cupped palms. "I hate this question anyway."

"Why?"

"I could feed you a line about family tradition, about it being a respectable occupation for one in my position. And then I could drool out some rubbish about wanting to change the world and wanting to become a better man. Most of these reasons are partially true, but none are really the answer."

"You're barely a man," Leia points out. "You're not even eighteen." Her fingers brush his short bangs back and settle again on the mattress.

Treize turns his head away from her touch with a humorless laugh. "Who honestly cares about that besides liberals and politicians?"

Her full lips turn downward, and she resists the urge to reach out for him again. "I think you know why I let you sleep," she says as she rises. "Come on. You really need to eat something."

xXx

(Early November 188 – Day 0 + six weeks)

Treize pulls his new black turtleneck sweater over his head and lets it linger for an indulgent inhalation before dragging it the rest of the way down his face. It's what Leia smells like. Dryer sheets.

He feels clean. Fresh from the shower, shaven, with a pair of brand new pants and a top that smells like an impractical combination of wind-dried linen and grass stains. Wearing nothing but underwear – good underwear – from the waist down, he slides onto the bed to take care of himself. From the nightstand, he grabs two narrow syringes, antiseptic solution, two bandages, and a roll of cotton dressing.

He goes through the well-practiced motions mindlessly. Unwrapping. Discarding. Peeling up bandages. Discarding. Inspecting. The skin grafts are stretched tightly over the holes in his leg, which are slowly filling with fresh muscle tissues. The grafts are cut into a lattice, like a pie or chain-link fence, and secured to the rim of each wound with sutures that should dissolve within the next month.

He can see through the tiny holes what's occurring below. A physiological marvel. A wonder of medical technology. One by one he slides the thin needles into the surrounding muscle tissues and injects the regeneratives. They burn all the way in, like a Zhang Virus vaccine. The entire process is painful, but he's grown to tolerate it like one learns to tolerate any unpleasant necessity in life. He stopped taking his other meds as soon as there was nobody around to glare at him until he choked them down. There's too much at stake to lose hold of the little bit of clarity he's recovered, small and precious, too fragile to feel confident about.

The long, pink, mowed-looking track of stripped flesh on his left leg is more humorous to him than anything now, like somebody took a man-sized vegetable peeler to him. It's not really humor, but calling it that makes it lighter and that much more manageable.

He grabs his new phone – colonial reception only – from off the nightstand and takes photos of both legs before cleaning and tidying everything back up. Documentation. This really is happening. Treize feels nothing for his wounds now except dim annoyance. They're not symbolic. They're not a reason for pity. They're nothing to be proud of. They're simply another routine, like brushing his teeth.

He carefully slides into the khakis he's carelessly pressed and eyes the notebook computer at the foot of his bed with wary disinterest. He hasn't checked his mail since before deploying over a month-and-a-half ago. The thought of checking it makes him even more averse to checking it, exacerbating an already daunting prospect. So he's planned this session of email-checking like a date. Prepared mentally. Gotten squeaky clean for it. Though how long has it been since he's been on a date - a real date, a planned date with someone he was actually interested in? Doting on it for a second, rifling through his memories, he can't recall a single instance of such a thing.

For a second, he's stunned by this.

Then he twists around and props his many pillows up against the headboard to create a comfortable and appealing environment for himself. He fires the computer up. Settles back. Hopes secretly that he will be unfortunate enough to hit another broadband blackout. Of course, he finds a signal as soon as he's sought it, and while disappointing, it's not surprising. He is, after all, lodging with the daughter of the richest family on the colony, the Winners of L3, minus the immaculate reputation.

Two-hundred and eighty-seven unopened messages stare him down. The sound Treize makes is somewhere between a laugh and a groan. He scrolls the names: Renzetti. Mother. Catalonia. Merquise. Merquise. Mother. Dia? Merquise. Renzetti. Koh. Koh. Thomson. Merquise. Catalonia. Merquise. Renzetti. Mother. Noin. Koh. Merquise. Merquise. Merquise…

Wide-eyed and scowling, Treize closes the laptop with a firm snap and tosses it back to the end of the bed. He's both relieved and disappointed when it doesn't fly off and smash onto the wooden floor below. His stomach cramps and he sinks into a slouch and crosses his arms over where a piece of missile shrapnel once pierced him.

xXx

...A buzz saw screams against titanium alloy. Don't they know that the suit is made of titanium alloy? His head lolls. He's white and cold-sweating, teeth ground together in agony that he can't vocalize. He's weak. Too weak to yell to them that he's dying. He has to be. Because there's so much blood, everywhere, dripping onto the floor, running down his leg, his face, his stomach…

Plop. Plop. Plop. It's the only sound he hears, the sound of his life emptying into the cockpit. He wishes it were quicker.

...Then there's pounding. Scraping. A groaning of hinges. Muffled voices yelling. He's shivering. The air is stale, and every breath he takes lances his gut. He regrets that he didn't call his mother before he left. Or Zechs. Or his uncle. Would he have wanted to talk to his father? His father used to call…

...He's growling as they jiggle the bar, a primal sound that he's never made before. He begs them to just cut the thing. His eyes water in a slow, constant stream. He grabs the extraction tech by the throat.

"Stop fucking around and cut the bar!" he spits, wild-eyed.

He's manic, strong, out of his mind with pain and his body's last-ditch surge of adrenaline. He's lost nearly three pints of blood onto the floor. It takes a man twice his size to pry his hands free. Some woman with a red cross on her armband tries to squeeze into the cockpit and inject him with something.

"Are you trying to fucking kill me?" he yells in her face as he snatches the syringe from her hand. He throws it out the hatch and into the crowd he doesn't know is gathered below.

...A hand saw buzzes. There's cutting, twisting… He screams and screams…

xXx

Treize gasps loudly, and every muscle in his body contracts in a spasm of terror. His breath hitches, and he clutches his chest like his great aunt does after every Christmas dinner. The artificial moon cuts through the duvet from a gap in the curtains. It's disgusting light, he decides as he rakes his hand through his nightmare-disheveled hair.

He wonders why he's still shocked when he wakes up from this dream. This memory. It's the same one he has nearly every night, the same one that paints the purplish bags under his eyes. The same one that makes him zone out throughout the day in a punctuated series of violent flashbacks that leave him tense and skittish even when he's no longer thinking of it.

He rises and slides on loose cotton pants and a tee that lay in a pile on the floor near the bed. He leaves the sickly false moon behind. He also leaves behind his crutches, more out of unconcern than spite, and he limps, grabs the walls and doorways for support as he makes his way to the living room. There's a TV, a couch, and a pair of lime green chairs that offset the black and grey of the décor. It's something he never would have chosen for himself, and he can't decide if he finds them hideous or avant-garde**.** Does one necessarily preclude the other?

He stretches carefully across the length of the couch and flips the television on with the remote. He turns the volume low, and a string of late-night advertisements lose his scattered attention quickly.

So he stares at the ceiling.

xXx

(Mid-November 188 - Day 0 + 2 months)

Leia pokes her head into Treize's room. He's on his bed, notebook on his lap, checking some of his mails because he's finally summoned the guts to really go at it. His hair is getting long, probably longer than regulations would appreciate. He likes it better this way, and he thinks he'll keep it when he returns to his unit, maybe only to piss off his peers. Because he will get away with it. He always does, a tiresome if convenient reality.

He opens a message from Zechs, the forty-sixth one he's received from him since deployment:

"Treize, / I wish you would write, but I'm sure you've already read that a hundred times. Or maybe you haven't. Maybe you haven't read anything from me. Maybe you're dead. I don't know. I wish you would write. / Zechs."

Treize gnaws on the inside of his hollowed cheek as his eyes pass over the words again. Zechs has sent him at least one email every day since he left Earth. The first couple after the fight were long, filled with concern and deeply detailed. They described the latest in his training 'In case you're bored,' and relayed enthusiastic synopses never-dull Lake Victoria gossip. Zechs must have spoken to Noin. He knows exactly what happened, the extent of Treize's injuries, the medals and honors he's received in all but actuality.

Once in an earlier mail, one of the first ones he sent, he attached a press photo of Treize's Leo after extraction, the chest armor blown wide open, a curious throng still lingering, impervious to the rain and the thick black smoke billowing from what's left of the command center. Zechs' caption: "Major Osei said that you should have died. Chin – loudly enough for everyone to hear – called Osei a jealous twat. Needless to say, Chin will be on extra duty until graduation."

But with every passing day, the mails have become shorter. Many are abrupt. Angry. Falsely unconcerned. And for every dozen passing jabs, there is one pages-long confessional begging for communication. These particular mails are touchingly personal and horrible – just horrible - to read. The one sent on Treize's eighteenth birthday was the worst of all. That one he couldn't even finish.

Today he decides to write back to email number 46. He even hits the 'Reply' button. But his fingers freeze over the keys. There's no sane excuse for what he's doing. Rejecting Earth. Rejecting his family. Rejecting every institution of stability he's every known. In a flurry of thoughtless keystrokes, he writes:

'I don't want you to see me like this.'

Leia clears her throat.

Treize startles and, for a breath, he's a single primed mass of potential, completely ready to hobble away, lash out a fist, or hide wherever he can squeeze himself. Leia's face contorts with concern as he blinks through the surge in hyperawareness. He feels utterly out of control of himself, shamefully so, so unlike the person he's always been, always known for his calm clarity, or, at least, his ability to fake it.

She takes a small, hesitant step into his room. "I made dinner."

Unwinding occurs in a sequence of small, cautious fractions. But it's hard, because it's stress completely beyond reason, far beyond the fact that there is no threat. He closes the draft of his reply. 'Save?' Certainly not. He snaps shut the notebook and pushes it to the side. Takes a deep breath. Unclenches his fist.

"It's chicken," Leia continues. Pause. "From Earth."

Treize makes a noise that sounds like a cough but is actually a laugh. "Obviously."

A smile warms her face. "I breaded it, with basil and oregano."

"Like my mother's recipe."

"Truly?"

Treize returns her expression. "No."

xXx

(Late November 188 – Day 0 + 9 weeks)

In his dreams, Treize screams through the same terrifying and nightmarish scenes almost every night. Only tonight, when he opens his eyes in panicked horror, he actually hears himself screaming in the guest bedroom of Leia Barton's apartment. In the ensuing silence, it crosses his mind that he should perhaps be embarrassed, but he can't find the sentiment.

His copper hair is plastered to his temples. Again. He touches at his sideburn and then his neck, beaded with cold sweat. Again. He feels the drain of malaise. A dull ache. A slow, blunt gouging.

He rises. He's taken to sleeping in his loungewear because his insomnia has become unhealthily predictable. When he leaves his room, he skirts the walls for support as he limps as soundlessly as he can to the living room.

Shadows from the TV mottle the white ceiling above, and he lazily searches for a pattern that he knows won't emerge. His typical routine is to stay in the living room until colonial dawn, until Leia wakes and finds him there, a frown on her cute face that collides with the pleasantness of her greeting. Then he usually showers, shaves, dresses, sits, and unproductively contemplates contacting his family. He often thinks about the colony. The colonists. Who they are. Why they are. He might think sometimes about the unit, wonder if Koh's got her hands full, whether all of his training plans are falling to shit without him there. He also tends to wash out, stare unblinking at the wall, or, perhaps, out the window. He often remembers to eat breakfast at around noon and, by then, will call it lunch. Leia then comes home from her twelve-hour shift, and they always eat dinner together. Afterwards they sometimes exchange light words about neutral topics like the colony's construction and, if he's feeling adventurous, news from Earth.

A facsimile of every other day on Triple-Nine. Over and over and over.

"What are you watching?"

Treize has gotten better at moving through the predictable stages of paralysis, absorption, recognition, and uncoiling without visibly startling like an animal. But even still, he can't quite stop his head from jerking up off the pillow. Just a little. Much better than before. Much.

His tired gaze flicks to the TV. Another infomercial for some single-use kitchen appliance. He looks back at Leia. She's dressed in sleep clothes, a pair of small shorts and a fitted white tee. Her limbs are skinny spindles. He can't read the expression on her face. In fact, he's not very good at reading her at all.

This is perhaps why he's surprised when she walks to the couch, mounts it on all fours, and fits herself into the narrow space between the back of the couch and his body. She rests her head on his shoulder and lays her arm across him.

Except for his bobbing his Adam's apple, Treize is absolutely still. His attention flits down to his own arm, which curled around her waist the moment she lay down, an unconscious response that he now regards with some fresh curiosity.

Hm.

They lie there for minutes of silence. Neither moves. He feels strapped tight, and he wishes he wasn't so tense.

"You know what's going on, don't you?" Leia whispers.

"I read the pamphlet," he utters, tone carefully bland as his eyes track back to the infomercial.

Leia rubs her lips together, and her hand slides along his chest. Her touch is warm and sure. It's different, absolutely intentional in the way that his is not. Of all the thoughts he's been having, the ecstatic ideas, the unsettling speculations, very few of those thoughts have been about her. Not in that way. No thoughts that are more ambitious than the typical reflexive and mindless attention to female anatomy that most teenage males pay.

It's peculiar, in a sense, because he has typically been amorous to the extent that a charming, ridiculously busy man in uniform can get away with being. But there's no room for that here, not with his mind so full of everything. Fullness like he's never felt, a pendulous oscillation between manic contemplation and complete and utter emptiness. Frightful emptiness that he can barely claw out of to muster concern for, it's so black.

"I wish you would go to physical therapy."

He pushes out a weary sigh. "So many wishes for me."

/I wish you would write./

"A soldier who neglects rehabilitation will have a difficult time reintegrating into the unit."

"I don't need you to quote regulation." Treize's hold on her tightens apologetically, even as he continues to snap out things he regrets. "I helped write it."

"You said you wanted to run again. Besides, it's my job to help my patients."

"If I'm your patient, then what you're doing is not exactly a chapter taken from the little nurse's book of ethics."

"I never said I was a _good_ nurse." Leia's fingertips trace around the rim of his shirt collar. Gently, she touches the bare skin of his neck. "I made an appointment for you. Wednesday."

He closes his eyes before he can roll them. It's a familiar irritation, something that warms him because he's missed it, the kind that tugs at him when he's defied. "Where is it?"

"Down the street. Her name is Doctor Tharp."

"Fine." He's exhausted, and he thinks, remarkably, that he might be able to fall asleep.

She pats the lean, ill-tended muscle of his chest. "Thank you."

Her light weight bares down on him as she sits up. He watches her, disappointed, as she leaves him and walks back to her room.


	6. Chapter 5

See Prologue for notes.

Oh, and note: I am so lame and weak, because I could not stop myself from inserting a Limbo-style flashback in this chapter, for better or worse. It's denoted with italics.

Thanks to all who continue to follow this story, and a special thanks to LH and Masamune Reforged for the excellent reviews!

xXx

(Late December 188 – Day 0 + 13 weeks)

Treize is running. He's winded, pathetically so, but he's running at fifty percent gravity thanks to an air pressure suspension unit. Running. For the first time since the rebel incursion, he feels the sweet bloom of exhilaration. Sweat, hot sweat, excellent sweat, drips down his face, back, and chest. His arms pump rhythmically, making him feel faster and stronger than he is. His right leg hurts, and his gait is still off – uneven - because of it, but still. He's running. He imagines sprinting to the finish line at the end of his PT test. Or on emergency mobilization, running to the hangar to suit up and roll out. Or running on a wooded trail through the forest on the massive expanse of property that is one ailing parent away from being entirely, frighteningly his.

Dr. Tharp watches him with a critical eye. She circles him slowly, brows drawn, grey hair pulled back sloppily. She pauses, monitoring him from the back, the way the line of his shoulders dips to the right every time his bad leg strikes, the compensatory twist. The antigravity unit, a pressurized bubble that encases him from the waist down, shows through its clear walls his legs, lean legs that were built to run, scarred deeply and severely. She murmurs for him to stop, calls him 'young man' while doing it. When he doesn't, she kicks out her toe to the power button at the back of the treadmill and stands, arms akimbo, as the unit rolls to a slow halt. He decompresses the grav unit like he's so used to doing and keeps himself to a small frown as he peels out and dismounts.

"How did that feel?"

"I would have liked to go longer," he tells her through deep, heavy breaths, posture reflecting hers.

"I think that's enough for today." Doctor Tharp coughs wetly and clears her throat with a crackling hack that tells more about her smoking habits than the lines around her mouth. "You looked like you were hurting there towards the end."

"Is that not an unavoidable component of recuperation?" he asks rhetorically.

"You're looking much better. I don't want to push you too far."

He nods as he pulls a plain white towel from a small bin on the floor and wipes it across his face. "Better, though?"

She nods in confirmation.

"Good."

"I wish all of my patients were like you. Once we finally got you here. If you'd waited much longer, you would have been limping for the rest of your life."

She turns, ending this session like the rest without a word of indication that they're actually finished, and stalks off, back to her messy desk in her disorganized office. Her own bad leg, the opposite of his, some congenital deformity, falters with each step. He shakes his head in her wake and tosses the sweaty towel into the receptacle labeled 'Used.'

On his way out, he schedules another appointment for the next day. The receptionist tells him that he has to wait at least one day, that she can't double-book him - and didn't the doctor already tell him that? But Treize smiles, leans against the counter, and confides in her that it would mean a great deal to him if he could get in just one session on the Gravex tomorrow morning with Doctor Bellows. The young woman's mouth curls in one corner and she looks down, unconsciously coy, and says that she'll make an exception just this once. A game they play, because she always says that it'll be just once, and it never is. He thanks her with an even broader smile, one that he's not exaggerating because he's juiced up on endorphins. Her cheeks color, and she watches his ass as he heads for the door.

He uses a cane now, and while he's never imagined having any enthusiasm for such a graduation, Treize is learning that everything about recovery is relative. Compared to awkward crutches, a cane feels like an upgrade from jet engine to Vernier. He doesn't mind leaning on it because, god, it feels so good to use even part of that leg normally. He travels a path he's well accustomed to, down the elevator, out to the street, down Yuy Avenue – there's one on every colony, Leia's told him – towards the border of Sectors 4 and 2.

Treize takes a shortcut through Barton Plaza, a broad rectangle of wealth, a promise of future prosperity to the rest of the partially-completed colony. A dramatically architected high-rise stands as the jewel at the center, boldly imprinted at the crown with the Barton Corporation logo. His attention follows a pair of employees as they cross the green campus, two men in suits, indistinguishable from any businessmen on Earth except maybe in the bleak state of their bottom line. At least, that's what Treize assumes. He hasn't checked the stocks in months.

He pulls over to a welcoming bench that sits beneath a full-headed tree, a deliberate tree, one transported at adulthood to this exact spot for some precise reason. Settling down, Treize pauses, inhales deeply, and feels a wash of white calm. That smell, the smell of the tree, of the watered grass, reminds him of Earth. The pang of longing puts a melancholy smile on his lips.

But he's happy here. He's decided that, at the least. He likes the people, hardy, a little brusque, a little wary – especially of him, because he sticks out like a wolf among birds. Whether they know who he is or not, he's confronted on a near daily basis with inquiries and suggestive comments. Where are you from? You're look light. You're not from around here. He's light, because he's actually lighter than he's ever been thanks to colonial gravity. They say it shows in his face. He attributes it to being able to walk again.

He rests his cane beside him and stretches his arms along the top of the bench's back rest. The temperature is mild, comfortable enough for the athletic gear he wears, which he yesterday realized is identically similar in color and fit to his PT uniform. Green shorts. Black tee. He hadn't noticed upon choosing it. He felt good enough to chuckle over it and, for a short while, he wished it was real.

Another pair walk the paved path in front of him, gentlemen in white lab coats. His 20/10 vision picks up 'Barton Industries' on their blue ID badges. He's read about the Bartons – as much as he could find. Barton Industries is a subsidiary of the Barton Corporation, which is also the parent of the nebulous Barton Foundation. The foundation strikes Treize as rather Romefeller in that it has no public face to speak of. It's a black hole of information, where the closer one gets to it, the less there is to be found. The website is pure tripe, repetitions of hollow nothings, revealing no indication as to what it actually does or who is actually involved beyond its namesake. And Barton Industries? Pharma, bio-tech, psych, physics – theoretical and hard – materials, electronics, hardware, software, mechanical and chem. Immense amounts of brain power, a literal think tank.

That's the whole colony, really. All of the colonies. There's more per-capita intellect and technical expertise on any given colony than anywhere on dirt. The ones who designed colonial systems were often the ones who advised, the ones who directed, corrected, revised, and, oftentimes, settled upon their creations. Physicists. Incalculable numbers of engineers. Mechanics and construction workers with equal the smarts and none of the paperwork to prove it. Big brains.

And big anger.

That's what has Treize curious. That's why he stops and watches like this. It's more than an olfactory trip back home. There's something here, right on this campus, that jogs his thinking in a way that nothing else has since he left his unit. Something doesn't add up. The violence has steadily snowballed throughout his stay, with his incident serving as more of a point of colonial pride than anything else. The citizens were proud of what that boy did to him, proud of the faceless Tragoses that he blew apart with the touch of a trigger. It's not the cell acting alone anymore. And it's not just students and the unemployed. It's middle class now. More than that, it's anyone and anywhere. Sector 7. Sector 1. Sector 10. Arson. Protest. Gunfire. Sabotage. Self-sacrifice.

Noble, he thinks. Truly. To stand in front of a moving Federation APC with nothing more substantial for defense than an iron will is a last act of desperation. It's loud and humbling, and he's not sure if he feels strongly enough about anything to commit an act like that. It's the sort of thing people do when they have no other options left.

Which is where he begins to see the problem, because there are other options. The colony has two satellites, both with fully functioning refineries. Not only that, there are rumors – never officially confirmed – that they refined a kilo of GND seven years ago before running out of money and being bought up on short sale by the Barton Corporation. They now mine and refine titanium on both meteors for what the books say is a modest profit. They sell it to other colonies. They sell it to Earth. They sell it to the Federation. Why, he wonders, don't they do anything else with it?

It's quiet. And it's in the quiet that he feels it's buried. Something. Maybe something big.

Or maybe not. What does he know? He's smart enough to know that he can't derive something from nothing. What is it, though? Surely it's not a wish for that something to unveil with all of its terrible potentiality. Treize does not particularly want to die. He doesn't even particularly want to fight. And he loves Earth, absolutely, more than he's ever loved a person, and he'd go to virtually any length to protect it should the winds blow in that unspeakable direction. Maybe that's what he'd stand in front of a moving APC for.

But why not strike back? Why not get the Federation where it hurts most, at the seat of its inception? Not the outlying colonial units. Who cares about Wheelies, anyway? Those units are where the Federation send troublemakers, sociopaths, and men who like above all else to shoot things, because anyone who's worked for the Federation military knows that you don't make a career putting down old ladies and kids, even while such suppression is daily protocol for the types who get stationed on-colony.

Treize gets it. He really thinks he does. He doubts anyone would believe it, but he believes he understands the colonies as much as someone from Earth can. The greatest difference between them and any other oppressed people in history is that they have all the tools to snatch their oppressor by the throat. That they don't tells him that they are either a sub-race of Gandhis or that they're waiting it out for the right moment. He won't place a wager on that one. He's older than that now. Suddenly. Mysteriously. What changed? He's still not sure what, exactly.

Three passing women in skirt suits give him a skeptical look. He nods at them and lifts an easy paw. He wonders if his presence here every day isn't making him appear extremely suspicious.

On the way back to Leia's, he steps into a small bakery that he always passes on the way home from physical therapy. It strikes him as not particularly traditional in décor, but the smells floating from the kitchen are as appealing as any on the Continent. He asks in rusty but passable French – a dare met with a genuine smile from the proprietor - for a chausson aux pommes and a pain au chocolat. He marks it as another successful interaction, another shred of proof that he's adapting now, like the person he used to be. And it feels good.

It's Leia's day off, and when Treize walks in with breakfast, she rises quickly from the table near the bay window, a wide grin on her face, and follows him into the kitchen.

"Hi."

"Hello."

"I didn't even hear you leave."

"I have breakfast."

She reaches for the bag. He holds it away from her. Behind his back. Over his head. Anywhere out of her limited reach. She laughs as she struggles and, in an inventive move, she stands high on her tiptoes and presses her lips to his. He freezes, and her fingers run down his arm until they hit his hand and then the bag. She snags it from him, breaks the kiss with her tongue impishly between her teeth, and inspects the merchandise. He regards her with bemused interest.

"That was underhanded."

"No more than your tactics. Oh!" she exclaims as she reaches into the brown paper bag. "Tell me this is filled with chocolate." She pulls the pasty out and takes a large bite. There's chocolate in the corner of her mouth when she smiles and holds it up and out to him. "Want some?"

He shakes his head and takes the bag back. Chewing thoughtfully on another considerable bite, she appraises him.

"You look good. Healthy. Dare I say even a little happy."

He moves to the cupboard, takes out a black, square serviette, and plates the apple pastry that's his by default. He takes a seat on one of the two stools pulled up to the island at the center of the kitchen. There's a stress-free domesticity in the way they share their living space, in the way that he's familiar with a place that's not his own. A woman's place. But he tries not to think about that too much, because he's not sure that it really means anything.

"I ran today," he tells her, silly pride edging in on his tone.

Leia snags a napkin from the holder on the counter and wipes at her lips. "Really? On the Gravex?"

Treize nods as he cuts into his pastry with a knife and fork. It's been so long since he's indulged in something like this. Too long. For four staunchly dedicated years, he's denied himself the little things, tiny pauses, moments of pure, intended selfishness. Vacation. Sleeping in. Dessert. He's worked with a machine's restless drive, developing his career, strategizing with his uncle, meeting the right people at the right times, thinking, planning, extrapolating, deciding. The haughty hedonist is an inside joke for him alone, an image he only wishes was reality. Most days on duty he can't even stay still long enough to enjoy a hot bath. The last time he convinced himself to try it, he fell asleep.

His gaze drifts to Leia, who is fixated on her breakfast. She eats slowly, turns the pastry in her hand, appreciates the eggwash and the soft feel of it, the way the chocolate crumbles. Her hair is curled, framing her face softly. She licks her fingers and lips.

"My father wants to meet you," she mumbles around a mouthful.

Instantaneous aversion to the idea sours Treize's face, and, looking up, Leia catches it.

"You saved his life. He only wants to thank you."

There's a clink on glass as his knife digs through the chausson. "Can't he send a card?"

"Aren't you supposed to be a gentleman?"

"I'm probably supposed to be a lot of things."

"Counts are at least supposed to be polite and gracious, as far as my fairy tales tell me. Though to your credit, you do have the dashing and handsome part down."

"I think you are confusing dashing with cantankerous, somehow."

"You're really so much better." The corners of Leia's eyes crinkle as she smiles. "You don't even seem like the same person."

"Oh?"

"Now you're more like the guy whose biography was plastered all over the webs a few months ago. I wondered at first if there hadn't been a case of mistaken identity."

"Perhaps it's all a very complicated ruse," Treize points out with a short laugh as he puts down his silverware and crosses his arms over a t-shirt still damp with cold sweat.

"I'm not even sure what your title is supposed to mean. Count. Is that even a high rank?"

"It only means that my father was a count and, before him, his father was a count and so on ad nauseum," he dismisses of his social status. "The truth is that there are very few real gentlemen in this world, and I do not count myself among them."

She leaves her pastry on the counter and her socked feet make no sound as she crosses the kitchen to where Treize is sitting.

"Why is that?" she asks him.

"You truly don't know? How is your food?"

"Mmm." Her light eyes flit to the large cut of pastry he hasn't finished. "You don't like it."

"I don't typically eat much in the way of breakfast." He spreads his legs wide enough to let her stand between them. He wonders for a moment if she's going to try to climb onto his lap, but she doesn't. "When and where?" he murmurs.

"I thought we would drop by his office tomorrow. He practically lives there, when he's not off-colony on business. He's so busy with work." Her hand, soft and sure, runs over the scar on his bad leg. "Does this hurt?"

"No." Treize wraps his arms around her lower back and pulls her in. "Are you planning on taking over?"

"Much to my brother's irritation." Her eyes lock with his, and there's confidence and acknowledgment there. "It makes me happy that you assumed that – that I'd be the one taking over."

"Why not you?"

"He's my older brother. And if you look at the company like your title, he's next in line. But he's not like me and Daddy. He doesn't get it."

"And you do."

"Yes. Anyway, Daddy says he has other plans for Trowa."

"You're close to your father."

She rests her hands on Treize's shoulders and squeezes, feels the muscle and bone contours below her fingers with an inquisitive tilt of her head. "We tell each other everything. He raised us both since Mum died. I trust him completely."

Leia is placid, at ease with herself and sure of the world in a way that's beyond being financially well-endowed. It's profound stability that radiates contagiously from everything about her. She leans in close and touches her nose to his temple.

"Not bad for frozen, is it?" she whispers in his ear. "The pastries."

"No." He swallows. "Not bad at all."

xXx

(Early January 189 – Day 0 + 14 weeks)

Treize is lying on the couch again. He managed almost a month without awakening with the gruesome afterimage of his ruined leg fading in the forefront of his mind. He doesn't wake up screaming anymore. He barely even tenses, and he likes to think of it as progress rather than acclimatization. It does feel like progress, because now he can rest when the lights go out. He doesn't stare for hours on end anymore, because now he can move. And he does. He walks the colony for hours a day, barely limping, using the cane only as a safeguard against overexertion. He's obsessively careful of himself.

But he's wide awake tonight. Wired for action that never unfolds, an attack that never occurs. Primed for the brain-rotting mumble of the TV, the only thing that can leaden his eyelids after a nightmare besides copious amounts of alcohol, a tactic employed once and never again. It's ridiculous, because he rarely watches TV back on Earth. He can only abstractly imagine what it would be like to have enough time to vegetate without first incurring some tremendous physical debilitation.

It's the Watermelon Wizard, exclamation point. A twenty-five credit spoon with a toothed edge that blasts through rows of hard, unpalatable seeds with the flick of a wrist. It occurs to him that a normal spoon would do an adequate job. And he's quite certain that they grow seedless watermelons rather commonly. And then he thinks: Are there really so many watermelons on the colony that the condition warrants such an ad?

He scratches his one-day scruff and wonders for a moment what he would look like with a beard. How he would look with a beard, scraping seeds out of a melon with the Watermelon Wizard. How he would look, limping with a cane, bearded, scraping seeds out of a melon with the Watermelon Wizard, alone, secluded like a madman, a lamentation of something or another rasping past chapped lips…

Why did he throw himself in front of that missile? Nobody ever asked him. Didn't anybody want to know?

Leia materializes from the darkness. She's wearing the same thing as she always does at night, as is he. He spares a half-serious moment to wonder if he's not having de ja vu, which would snug in conveniently with the overriding surreality of his convalescence on the X-18999.

It's not de ja vu. She approaches him, silent as she always is, like the best of killers, sits astride his lap, and kisses him. He kisses her back, hungrily, without any consideration or doubt. Smoothes her hair. Touches her waist. He's wanted this, wanted to make sure that she wanted this too. Because it's important to him.

With his help, she pulls his shirt over his head and tosses it. She touches the scar below his sternum.

"I'm so sorry this happened to you." Her voice, scarcely a whisper, is gravid with emotion. "I hate the rebels so much. Nobody supports them."

Treize runs his hands up her thighs just until his fingertips disappear under the hem of her shorts. Short little shorts. His breath quickens as his mind drifts further up from where his touch has stopped. "Somebody supports them. Gives them money... Maintaining an armed rebel cell is not cheap."

Leia bends down and holds his face as she kisses him. Her moves are slow, conscious, infused with sensuality. He slides his hands up her shirt, skimming over smooth skin. She sighs against his cheek when he cups her small breasts.

She sits up, removes her shirt, lets it drop to the floor, and guides his hands up to where they were. Looking down at him, she's pale in the light of the television.

"You're too young to have that look on your face," she tells him breathily.

He sucks in a gasp as she shifts her hips, grinding down against him. "...What look?"

"The one that tells me that you think this is normal, what happened to you. Your leg." She touches the scar on his forehead and brushes aside his bangs, a familiar gesture. "This." Her thumb then brushes over his lower lip. "This… this frown…"

The sexual momentum gathered and pulsing between them sputters to an abrupt halt and collapses with the hard clench of Treize's teeth. Eyes narrowed, cold and violently disinterested, he lets his hands fall to his sides.

"Stop trying to figure me out, Leia," he warns. "You're not even close."

There's a long spread of regretful silence. Only deep into it does Leia seem to slowly remember that she's half-naked. "I'm sorry," she apologizes quietly. "I just... I don't understand you." She slides off of him and bends down to retrieve her shirt. She holds it to her chest in a nervous fist. "And I want to."

He stares up at her, brows drawn together in wordless but dying judgment. When she turns to recede back into the darkness, Treize's hand, lightening fast, catches her wrist. His voice is low and thick.

"Wouldn't you rather come to my room?"

xXx

(Late January 189 – Day 0 + 17 weeks)

Treize is scanning the contents of his inbox. An ongoing process. Old ones he didn't care enough to read before are interesting to him now. Hot spot warnings for military travelers. Regulation revisions. PR memorandums – do NOT comment to the press regarding the bombings in São Paulo. Done.

New mail drops in with a frequency that makes him wonder if anyone back at his unit knows what 'convalescent leave' means. He responds to a few things that sound vaguely urgent, like what the pass code is for the server room. Nothing detailed, only the basest level of communication. He's trying to put some order to his correspondence, weed out what he can live without, when he notices something that strikes him as odd. Abruptly, all emails from 'Merquise, Zechs, CAD, LVSA' have ceased. Not one for the last twelve – no – seventeen days. There are two yet unread, the last two, solitarily highlighted. Treize tries to think of what might be going on, some mock field deployment or preparation for finals, perhaps. It could definitely be the latter. Finals at Lake Victoria are a brutal, weeks-long affair. That's likely it.

The first of Zechs' emails is a forward from Colonel Llewellyn announcing the Lake Victoria Specials Class of 189 graduation ceremony to be held Saturday, March 2nd at the parade field. Guest speaker is General Catalonia, Commander, UESA Specials Corps, who will be conferring upon the top cadet an advanced commission of one grade. It's a tacit invite, no more than an implication, remotely cordial, only as much as basic manners would dictate.

The last email, the final comment before Zechs Merquise drops off the face of Treize's world, is a message containing three words:

"I miss you."

"I wish you wouldn't," Treize says under his breath. But there's no frustration there. Instead, his head falls a little to the side as his thoughts are dragged into the past, back to his parents' house a few years ago. Such familiar words. A familiar feeling, an unusual sort that knocks him off canter even just thinking about it. It was the worst leave of his young career, present included, almost wholly without enjoyment and featuring little but fighting, pushing, and misunderstanding. It was towards the end of it, when letting Zechs have his way began seeming like the only viable option. It seems like a great defeat to him now...

_xxx_

"_You're not going to cut it off, are you?" Treize asks, looking up from a page-long list of required items, paperwork, and activities stabbed at the very top with the words 'Lake Victoria Specials Academy First-Year Preparation Checklist.' _

_He's standing at the foot of Zechs' bed, dressed very down and very out of regs in jeans and the undershirt of his combat uniform, feet bare, hair a careless mess. He looks like a slob compared to the boy he's with, who has yet to experience what it feels like to be on a mere week of leave after eleven months straight of duty. _

_Though he'll know soon enough, it seems. _

_Zechs crouches at the bottom drawer of his dresser, digging through deep and roughly organized piles of things that don't seem to belong in any other place except in a junk drawer. His long arm sweeps around, knocking things aside, unconcerned with making a mess because he's leaving soon and not coming back for a very long time._

"_I'm going to show up like this. If they ask me to cut it, I'm going to tell them no. If they force me to cut it, I guess I'll have short hair." He pulls an electronic device out from beneath a shoe box containing Treize doesn't know what and hits the drawer closed with his foot when he stands. "Like you."_

_Treize tries to picture it, and he almost can, but he's not sure he'd like it. "That would be strange."_

"_Yes," Zechs replies, absently fingering a piece of hair a bit too short to be tied back with the rest of it. "It would." _

_The blond crosses the room to the open suitcase that takes up almost half the surface area of his small bed, one that will be too short for him in a few years. He shoves what he found in-between the folds of the single outfit he's bringing with him. Then he stops and looks over at Treize, face blank and closed-off save for a soft glow of defiance in his eyes, a quality rarely absent from them. It's one of the things Treize finds compelling about his friend, but tonight it's irking, because tonight it feels like it's directed at him. _

"_Do you have copies of your medical records?"_

_Zechs pulls a folder from a zipper pocket on the outside of his bag and shakes it in the air for Treize to see before slipping it back in. There aren't more than a few sheets of paper in it, just enough to provide documentation of a few vaccinations and a broken wrist. It's glaringly incomplete, missing over half of the boy's life, though it's nothing that a story about a fire at a rural clinic in a different country can't fill. _

_He's back to looking at Treize. Staring, really. The defiance is hot now, showing in the jut of his chin and a smile that's small and carefully tuned to broadcast a precocious mixture of bitterness and fabricated ease._

"_Now you'll know what it's like to worry," he tells Treize, seemingly satisfied, smugly relieved as the words leave his mouth._

_Treize's hand drops to his side, still grasping loosely onto the list. His young face has gotten harder since the last time he was home, because he's a first lieutenant now. Because he's already fought his first battle and then four more. And while he was expecting to confront Zechs' decision to enroll at Victoria, he wasn't expecting to come out on the losing end of it. He certainly wasn't planning to help him pack. _

"_Is that what this is about?" _

"_No." Zechs too has become harder, though not from becoming a killer. The transformation doesn't seem to have any explanation attached to it. "I've hated being here while you were away. Alone. I'm done with it."_

"_And joining up is the solution." _

"_At least then I might see you some time besides Christmas, which I didn't even get this year." _

"_Is that really what this is about?" _

_Zechs' narrow jaw ratchets tight, evident in the flinching point near his ear. His right hand pulls into a quick clench and then releases. "Stop asking me things like that. And give me that sheet, please." _

_Treize does and then sits on the edge of the bed. From the open window he hears a pair of men laughing and cursing in Moksha, the stable hands coming in for the evening. It's warm out, windless and balmy. _

"_Why are you doing this, Milliardo?" It's a hopeless question, but one Treize truly has no answer to. He hasn't been able to get to the bottom of it, no matter what his approach, and he's too drained for any more games. He thinks for a moment of how much easier things were before Zechs decided that this was the way he was going to grow up._

_The answer comes after seconds of bitten-lip consideration. Hesitation._

"_Because look at you. Look what you are now. You stand for something. You're going to change things – at least, that's what you told me." The list crinkles in Zechs' hands as he turns his back to Treize and pretends very suddenly to be deeply interested in its details. "Maybe I want that," he says, voice quiet enough to barely reach across the room. _

"_Don't you think you already stand for something?" Treize kicks back inevitably._

"_I miss you when you're gone, and I'm tired of being left behind," Zechs tells him tiredly, weary in a way that a ten-year-old should never be. "I don't know why that's so hard for you to understand."_

_xxx_

Treize's eyes flit back to the monitor of his laptop. He blinks back into focus, and his fingers tap rapidly against his leg when he reads the email again. There was never a question that he missed Zechs back or that he misses him now. Just as Zechs wanted, his joining the military did bring them closer, even as it geographically took them farther apart. They speak a common language now, have a similar appreciation for certain ironies of soldierhood. Hearing an academy story is the only good part of many of Treize's days, because Zechs has a way with words that's only gotten more amusing with every passing year in the company of eccentric Victoria types. He misses that, those bright spots. He has different bright spots now, but they're not the same. Not at all.

It's then that he hears the squeaking seal of the apartment door as it opens, followed by hurried steps on hard floor, then carpet. Leia appears in his doorway, in her uniform, bracing herself broadly on the door jambs, breathless and visibly frightened.

"Oh, thank God," she says in a rush, sagging at the knees when she sees Treize sitting on his bed with his oft ignored computer perched on his crossed legs.

His wandering mind is quick to sharpen. "What's wrong?"

"The news said that an off-duty Federation soldier was found beaten half to death in Sector 2. They took him to Mercy Medical Center, and when I called, they wouldn't give me any information, so I tried to call you, and when you didn't answer, I was so worried." She presses shaking fingers to her brow. "God."

"There are over 130 Federation soldiers stationed on this colony," he says in an attempt to reassure that comes out rather poorly. It is a highly disturbing thought, that it could have been him, and he's mildly insulted that she thinks he could be easily overpowered. But he's not nearly in the shape he once was, definitely not as fast. He supposes then that it very well could have been him...

Leia sighs, exasperated. "Can't you let me be worried about you?"

"I do appreciate it," he tells her seriously.

"Do you?" She straightens herself out with a flat frown. "At least turn your ringer on," she tosses coolly over her shoulder as she heads down the hall to her room.

Treize smiles, impervious to the reason behind it, the warmth that compelled it, and is on his feet and trailing behind her in no time.


	7. Chapter 6

See Prologue for notes.

xXx

(Early February 189 – Day 0 + 18 weeks)

A wave of tension ripples down his spine, and he exhales sharply as he presses into her one last time. It's a hard and lingering push, one that makes her fingertips dig into his back with a small cry.

Treize was the one who started it that night, which is neither unusual nor by any means the rule. It was while they were doing dishes together after dinner, which Leia insisted on doing alone until he slid up next to her and bumped her over with the nudge of his elbow. She told him then that there was no way he knew anything about doing dishes, that he had scores of servants to wipe his nose and God knows what else, a challenge he met by dousing the sponge liberally with dish soap and aggressively scrubbing several grease and food-caked pans until the dishwater turned brown. Leia then conceded that, maybe, he might have done dishes once or twice before.

The dress she wore that evening was sleeveless, fitted, a nice outfit even for her. It hugged her hips, her small waist, her rear, and contrasted in deep maroon with the fall of her flaxen hair. From his height, Treize could easily see down the low cut of the front, the dark, narrow gap between breasts lifted by an expensive and padded bra. His interest was received with a fast splash of water that splattered a dirty streak across his white shirt. There was a light scuffle, fueled by feigned offense and childish payback, which ended somewhat predictably with them up against the counter, her arms and legs wrapped around him, his hands all over her, kissing and clutching. They left a trail of clothes to his room.

Treize lets his head dip to the crook of her shoulder, where he stays as his breathing slowly returns to normal. Leia's hand is in his hair, on his neck, warm and caring in a way that no one's been with him before. Resting in her arms like this, there's nothing on his mind, just a fuzzy sense of wellbeing and calm.

He winces as he slides out of her, sensitive and careful, and straightens his arms to hover over her small body. In the light from the nightstand lamp, her cheeks are pink, her lips full and colored with smeared lipstick. Leia looks very pretty the way she is now, soft and alive, blue eyes bright and searching. He hopes that he's satisfied her. She rises up and kisses him, her fingers ghosting over the firm angle of his jaw, holding him as though he was something delicate.

Pulling back, she presses her palm to her nose, sniffs deeply, and makes a face as she holds it up to him. The tip of his tongue darts out and touches the center of her hand, which smells like lemon dish soap. With a jingling laugh, she wipes her palm dramatically against the mattress as though hopelessly contaminated. Treize presses himself up and completely off of her and falls back on the narrow part of the too-wide mattress that he typically occupies at night. She rolls on her side and scoots in close, hugging herself to his profile.

"You don't have any siblings, do you?" The question comes out like a statement as Leia props her head in her hand, baby fine waves of blonde swallowing her forearm to midway.

One copper eyebrow arches. "Is that what you have been thinking about this whole time?"

"No!" she's quick to correct. "No, but the question did cross my mind. Yesterday. When you were going through your mails. I wondered if any of them were from a brother or sister."

"What do you think?"

"I think…" She pauses to consider. "...not. I think you're the only one." Her finger drifts across his closest shoulder, freckle-dusted from childhood summers spend outdoors, blissfully free, dutiful only to his imagination and a sense of infinite possibility.

"What makes you say that?"

"I don't know," she says, though the brief avoidance of his steady attention suggests that she really does.

"You're right, partially. My cousin grew up with me after his parents died."

"How old is he?"

"Thirteen."

"Do you get on well?"

Treize's gaze, distant but reflective, tracks across the ceiling. Do they get on well? He's asked himself many times why a boy five years his junior is more interesting to him than all the peers and adults he's rubbed elbows with. Perhaps because even the most charming and mysterious ones are secretly boring under the fluff and might. Zechs is a boy now, Treize thinks, but so close to crossing the dimly articulated line between being a child and the thing that comes next. It's an impressionable place that Treize has over the years tried to make himself a part of, not because he feels a responsibility (though he does), but because he wants to be something for Milliardo Peacecraft and whatever else he is swiftly becoming. The Why is actually quite uncomplicated. A smile quirks up one side of his mouth.

"He's my best friend."

"That's sweet," Leia tells him with a full smile that holds a measure of pleasant surprise. "He must be very mature, to be your best friend."

"Too mature. Sometimes. He's graduating from Lake Victoria Specials Academy next month."

The cheer drains from her face as she sifts through what he's not telling her. "Then he must have started at… How long is the program?"

"Three years."

In a wide beat of silence, her uneasy comprehension twists into severe incredulity. "That's horrible!"

"What?" he asks, expression tensing defensively at her outburst.

"'What?'" She puts a hand to Treize's chest and pushes. "You see nothing ethically perverted about letting a ten-year-old sign a military contract?"

"You seem astonished, and yet, how do you think I became a grade-three officer at the age of seventeen?" Treize's fingertips brush her chin in a placating gesture. "That's not the typical enrollment age. All of the other Specials academies and officer training programs have a minimum restriction of sixteen. But Lake Victoria is highly specialized. Elite. Small. Very focused, personal training for future officers of the highest caliber. The intellectual and physical capability thresholds alone weed out over 99.3 percent of applicants, and that's before the proctored battery of aptitude tests."

Leia grabs his wrist and pulls his hand away from her face with a hard scowl. "Being mature and brilliant and fast and strong doesn't automatically afford the faculties to make such life determinations."

"Their parents or guardians must authorize their admittance." Treize tries to explain the logic of it, which in his mind is quite perfect. And he has thought of the ethics of it, dozens of competent, educated adults have, including his uncle and even the mistrustful Field Marshal Noventa. "We're not kidnapping them."

"What kind of mother would send her child to military school at ten?"

"Mine."

"And after everything that's happened to you, she let your cousin go, too?" She shakes her head, disgusted. "Some mother."

"You are hardly the authority on what constitutes proper parenting."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

What it really means, and what Treize won't say, is that Leia's father called him into his office the week before under the condition that Leia not know. It means that Dekim Barton told him that he is a fine young man, a true paragon of what the Federation should be, a sympathetic person who's seen what the Earth is doing to the colonies, a hero who stands in a position to make a real difference in the course of the future. It means he told Treize that the colony needs help from soldiers like him, a reiteration of his prior statement spoken with a penetrating stare so lightless and chilling that Treize acutely remembered his own father, a man who always said far less than he meant, trusting his face and body language to adequately supplement. Treize read Dekim, clear as thin ice, for he's been eager for a reason that the rebels have consistently had money to buy weapons that Federation forensics said were about as black market as trafficked humans. It means that Leia and her father aren't so close as she believes.

"It means do not insult my mother again."

"You think this is all so normal, don't you?" Leia's voice has dropped to a hushed, observational tone, one not without a touch of what Treize thinks might be condescension. "And also that there's nothing morally corrupt about sending children into battle."

"I suppose you're going to tell me that, at eighteen, all confusion burns away and that one's purpose and sense of responsibility reach an instantaneous state of clarity."

"Don't warp this argument," she counters sharply, leaning over him with a confrontational crease between her eyebrows. "You know well that there's an immense difference between the state of mind of a ten or thirteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old. Don't confuse this. Don't turn this into something it's not."

Treize resigns the conversation to one of insurmountable misunderstanding. He won't convince her of anything, he knows this, so he spares the effort and proceeds in his explanation in a clinically professorial way. "Not all Victoria cadets are ten. That's the minimum age of entry. Most are fourteen or fifteen. Some are as old as eighteen. But the program is designed to engender skills at an early age. It's very similar to athletic training, in that respect."

"With weapons and life-threatening missions. Murder and death." Silence again beds between them, and in it, Leia studies him, confounded, because she's now pressed up naked next to someone she barely recognizes. "All of those cadets that came here with you could have died. One very nearly did," she reminds him. "You very nearly did."

"I am certainly old enough to decide risks for myself," he volleys, partially restrained and growing frustrated. "And you must trust me when I say that the cadets I've trained are well aware of the danger, of the implications of their actions. And if what they come to understand about the occupation is unacceptable to them, they're free to quit at any time. That's the caveat for Victoria students. They can quit any time they want before they turn eighteen. And do you know what the average retention rate is?"

Leia shakes her head and rolls slowly onto her back.

"More than eighty-seven percent."

"You're too young to be what you are, Treize. It makes me so sad."

xXx

(Late February 189 – Day 0 + 22 weeks)

"I want to forget everything that's happened today. All of it," Leia tells him, shoving her hands into the deep pockets of her wool coat.

Treize looks down at her and they stop walking, paused at the crosswalk of the busiest intersection in town, though it barely qualifies as a miniature of what he's seen in New York or Tokyo. His own hands are numbing to the chill, beyond the point of being cold – if one could call the dry colonial version of winter 'cold.' It's nothing compared to what he's missing in Eastern Europe, wet cold, the kind that sticks to you even when you've come in from it and can only be properly eliminated by a handmade fire. "Bad day?"

"It was horrible. I haven't seen that much blood in so long. Mimi was joking, saying she felt like Lady Macbeth. It wasn't funny."

"Was there an accident?"

The light turns green for them and they walk, still cautious of notoriously reckless Triple-Nine drivers that seem to believe traffic signals to be nonchalant suggestions rather than legal mandates.

"Can't you guess?" Leia asks softly.

Treize grabs her elbow and pulls her toward him while some cyclist bucking more colonial civil recommendation sweeps razor-close past them. He glares at the guy, who upon closer scrutiny is a girl, and gets it back just as hard.

"Who was it this time?" he questions, releasing her arm because, if anything, it should be Leia holding his arm. If anything.

"More of your friends. A bombed patrol vehicle. There was nothing left of the two inside, but it went off outside the pedestrian mall in Sector 5. Most of the casualties were civilian."

"I'm sorry," Treize says perfunctorily, though not for any lack of sympathy for her and everyone else on Triple-Nine. It's the sixth deadly attack in a month when it's suddenly become commonplace to hear the ratta-tatta of automatic rifle fire in the distance, even from the richest sectors.

"Don't be sorry for me," she tells him, words subdued by a gravity that over the past few weeks has steadily leeched the effervescence from her like a slow internal bleed. She buries her chin in the high collar of her coat. "Be sorry for those soldiers... for all those innocent people. I might have to go back in later. Let's go here. I want a drink."

Leia stops abruptly in front of a pair of heavy wooden doors with thick, twisted iron handles. Treize doesn't even catch the name of the place because she's disappeared into it so quickly - except for a limp hand that holds one side of the entrance open for him.

The place is a pub in every stereotypical sense of the word, dark and warm with wooden booths purposefully or incidentally tarnished, Treize can't tell. Very English. The barkeep who greets them has an accent different from many of the colonists, thick cockney that sounds exotically East End. There are a few like him who've emigrated to Triple-Nine, young mostly, with glittering dreams of space capital on rotating wheels. It's an adventure that continues to fascinate Earthers even though the era is nearly two-hundred years old. Some make it, though he's told that most don't. The colony appears deceptively ripe for opportunity.

"What would you like?" Leia asks as they step up to the bar, regarding him apologetically, as though she should feel ashamed for being affected.

Treize touches the small of her back, just a touch, there and gone. "Whatever you are having is fine."

After ordering, they slide across from each other in a wide booth that swallows Leia almost armpit-deep. She plants her forearms on the table to prove that she's not so effortlessly consumed. A TV on the wall plays colonial news, a British broadcast, remote and stoic.

Leia holds her hands in front of her mouth and lightly rubs them together as she speaks. "I always think it can't get worse, and I'm always wrong. And I think the worst part is that I don't understand it."

The barkeep swings by with two draught beers and cork coasters. He says a few mostly-scrutable words about daily food specials, which both politely refuse. He leaves menus anyway, as well as a small basket of overcooked, salted crisps.

"What part of it don't you understand?" Treize asks, focus unconsciously trailing the barkeep as he circulates empty tables to give them the extra wipe that just might bring more customers.

"I don't understand what everyone is blaming the Federation for."

"Honestly?" Treize presses, keeping his surprise in check only because he's reserving the option that she may be exhibiting unprecedented levels of sarcasm.

"The Federation is moving in the right direction. They don't want to have soldiers stationed here, because it's a waste of manpower and money. The supply route in itself must cost millions." Leia pauses to suck the head off of her ale. "And they wouldn't need to be here if everybody would trust my father to make the right decisions."

"The Federation is using the colonies in the most literal sense of the word. The relationship is quite simple to them: the colonies refine mineral and ore for the Earth to use. That is it. Everybody else here is incidental – and now becoming hugely problematic."

"It's business. We have a product, and we sell it to Earth to make a living."

"At an unfair price."

She takes a slow, contemplative drink, her stare all the while unrelentingly pinned on her companion's face.

"I wasn't aware that you were intimately familiar with the books of every mining company in space," she stabs quietly.

"Even giving the Federation the benefit of the doubt in terms of pricing, which I am only willing to do for the sake of this argument, there is the entirely separate matter of using military occupation in response to civil dissent and the fair business practice of refusing a Federation contract." He's suddenly hot, and he loosens his charcoal-colored scarf and lets it hang around his neck like a priest's stole.

"This colony is part of the United Earth Sphere Alliance," Leia drops handily, pressing the tip of her index finger firmly to the tabletop. "It would not have been built without Federation mandate and funding. They virtually own it."

"And do you enjoy being a piece of Federation property?" Treize asks bluntly. "Because your fellow colonists do not."

Leia's head tilts sharply to the side, cornflower eyes wide and flashing. It's a moment of extreme familiarity to Treize, because it's a look that keenly reminds him of Zechs. Hard, angry disbelief.

He's never seen this side of her before, and he thinks with an entirely different stroke of heat that he finds something intensely sexy about it. He takes a sip of beer, his first, and wishes for the warm burn of something stronger down his throat.

"Regardless of how they feel," she concedes wearily, "there's no excuse for stooping so low that they could be mistaken for the people they're fighting so hard to destroy."

The pub door swings open, hinges screaming loudly. A young man strides up to the bar, steps firm and heavily clacking in that unmistakable way that dress boots clack when worn by a man. He slides easily onto a bar stool and exchanges quick and low words with the proprietor.

"I know him," Treize says under his breath.

"The soldier?" Her tone is at once magnitudes brighter, something he admires about her, that ability to quickly drop an argument like a hot rock when it becomes too bothersome for sport. "He doesn't look Federation."

"That is because he's in the Specials." He smiles in spite of himself. "Excuse me for a moment."

Leia nods shallowly in the middle of a thirsty pull off her drink and makes an open-handed gesture towards the bar. Crossing the room, there's a drag in Treize's step that has nothing to do with injury. The weight of hesitation. It's been so long since he's talked to one of his peers face-to-face, a genuine peer who has no control over his career and doesn't expect him to impart wisdom or guidance, or even be a decent role model. It hits home that he's nervous. Actually nervous.

"Zepeda."

The young soldier turns leisurely from the glass of soda he's just begun nursing. His brown eyes are large but slightly drooping, and there is not one iota of amazement on his face except for the modest inclination of his head. "Treize," he drawls. "Or maybe I should say 'sir'?"

"Not yet," Treize tosses out a bit too excitedly. "What brings you here?"

Zepeda swivels around and drapes an arm loosely over the back of the chair beside him. "I'm the assistant inspector general for Third Brigade. Fact-finding."

Something in Treize clicks hard in that moment, like a broken bone snapped perfectly into place. His stance shifts noticeably, tightens and centers, at once starkly professional and intently interested. "For whom?"

"The man himself."

"I never thought you would be happy as a desk jockey," Treize admits grimly, as though discussing something perverse and publicly unspeakable.

Because that's what desk duty is to a member of a Corps built around the mighty mobile suit and everything gritty and glamorous about it. Paperwork is an obvious component of command, but there are so few designated desk jobs in the organization that it's usually difficult for a Specials officer to conjure the name of a fellow soldier assigned to such a position. It's only now that Treize can say he knows of one personally.

"Who says I'm happy?" A slender, olive-toned hand itches momentarily beneath dark, curly hair that, while short, is substantially longer than any Federation soldier would dare. One of the many distinctions that the Specials enjoy by rule of brute force rather than by regulatory allowance. "I'd rather be canned-up and guarding some embassy in the desert. But can't fly with a busted shoulder. Can't even sneeze the wrong way or they rip the badge right off your chest."

"What's going on?"

Zepeda hangs his head, looking over Treize's civilian clothes on the way down, and then spots the blonde woman alone across the room with two drinks in front of her. She's got her phone pressed to her ear, and as she listens on the other end, she pushes her mostly-finished beer to the side with a frown.

"That your girlfriend?"

Treize quickly glances over his shoulder. "No."

"She's cute."

"Why don't you come join us?" Treize invites, genuinely – vehemently – hoping that his offer is accepted. He's missed this so badly, the thrill of fraternal kinship, the intrigue and pride that characterizes the Specials Corps more than any other military or paramilitary entity. It's only when directly faced with what he's purposefully kept himself from that Treize feels the gaping hole that his career dismissal has carved out in his chest.

Zepeda twists the rank on the high collar of his dark green uniform jacket as he considers. He then nods to the eavesdropping barkeep, pointing a finger to Treize's table, and accepts with a lax "Sure."

Leia's off the phone by the time the two men reach the booth. She looks first at Treize, mood indecipherable, and then at the stranger who seems to have her house guest quite taken.

"Leia, this is Captain Zepeda. And this is Leia Barton."

"Danny," Zepeda corrects as he holds out his hand to shake hers. He manages a smile, a charmingly crooked one that transforms him from the man mothers lock their daughters away from to the boy that every mother shamelessly wants as a son-in-law.

"I'm sorry," Leia apologizes, "but I have to go back to work."

"Right now?" Treize tries to sound disappointed, which works only because he really didn't believe the situation was bad enough to warrant her return to the hospital after a fourteen-hour shift.

"Unfortunately." She slides out of the booth and wraps her coat tightly around herself. "It was nice meeting you, Danny." She then addresses Treize. "I'll call you if I'm later than midnight."

"Please do."

The young men wave her off, watch her go until she's completely out the door and has passed by all windows pointed street-side. Treize feels bad. It's been a terrible week for her and everyone else on-colony who gives a damn about anything. The whole place is tense and afraid, taut to the point of near-ripping into a riot. It rests especially hard on Leia, who sees the worst of it in vivid, horrific color every day. He wonders if she wouldn't come to Earth with him. To get away. It's a rogue thought that shakes him the moment he thinks it.

They slide into the booth. Zepeda takes Leia's place, a far more substantial presence than her, straight-backed and broad-shouldered if only because the cut, cloth, and design of the dress uniform encourages such a silhouette.

"Hanging with the Bartons now?"

Treize leans forward and cups his mug between his hands. "What do you know about them?"

Zepeda snorts out a laugh. "Not as much as I'd like. Maybe you can help me with that."

"Unlikely. I've only met him once."

"Got you beat there. But he doesn't talk. Not about anything relevant. Posturing, Federation pandering. Like I give a crap."

Though he claims to loathe the position, there are few soldiers Treize thinks would make a better IG than Daniel Zepeda. He's Victoria stock, but that's typically the only indication to anybody that he's got something sophisticated going on upstairs. Only a very small fraction of what occurs in his head ever comes out of his mouth, and when it does, it's truncated into slow, flowerless points of fact. He has the look and speech of a slag addict, which makes everyone believe that he is – a dangerous assumption for the many who try to put one by him.

"How long have you been here?" Treize asks.

"Three weeks. Though after today, I'd say another three more. These chuckleheads think they're on TV or something with all the extra nonsense they pad their standard procedures with. They're as good as saying they don't know what the hell they're doing." The barkeep swings by again, this time to drop a basket of chips in front of Zepeda, which he accepts with a long 'Thank you, man.' "Cat's pressing me to get to the bottom of it, but this thing is bottomless. Could use a hand."

"Leads?"

"Car bombers don't plant in public. Not like that. Takes time." He picks up a chip and taps it a few times in the air while he explains. "And that rig is behind gates or it's moving. So we look behind the gates. I look behind the gates."

"I could contact him," Treize offers at length, blue eyes fixed and serious. "Ask him to send somebody to assist you."

"I don't need your favors," Zepeda dismisses flatly. "He should send someone because I formally request someone, not because his nephew calls him out of the valley and says he saw poor Dan moping over a cola and fries. On Triple-Nine." He eats a couple of chips and takes a drink, the straw disappearing into the far corner of his mouth like a kid. "So how's the leg?"

"Swiftly returning to full functionality." Treize relaxes back in the booth with a tiny smirk. He plainly forgot to bring his cane with him one day a few weeks back and didn't even notice until he'd been out for three hours. He hasn't touched it since. An anticlimactic transition, really.

"Yeah, you barely limp at all." There's a break in which Zepeda's demeanor sharpens critically. "So what are you doing here?"

It throws Treize off, this piercing clarity, this brief glimpse at the true color of Zepeda's mind that few have ever seen. "Pardon?"

"Why are you still here? You hanging out or something?"

Below the table, Treize fingers the hem of his coat. "I wouldn't precisely call it 'hanging out.'"

"Why aren't you back at your unit?"

"I am still recovering."

"A company without a CO isn't much of anything." Zepeda punches it home, right in the gut, before rounding it off with a pleasantly chummy inquiry. "Hear about Victoria?"

"What about it?" Treize returns distractedly, still stuck in the thistles of Zepeda's abrasive examination.

"Treize Khushrenada no longer holds the title for highest final exam score."

"No?"

"Missy cadet of the universe beat it first, then your cousin beat it even worse."

That wrenches Treize's attention right back into place. "Zechs?"

"Everyone's having a fit. Different units are sending reps out to court them. Totally unheard of." Zepeda shakes his head with a smile stuck somewhere between amused and annoyed. "Hilarious."

"Hilarious. Do you want a drink?"

"Nope."

The sound from the TV swells between them. Treize turns his head and catches a few manic camera shots of demonstrations, pools of people larger and rowdier than he's seen in broadcasts before. It's a montage, the worst of the worst, a veritable top ten of pandemonium. Somebody throws something from the crowd, a rock or an empty bottle, it's hard to tell. Probably a bottle, because ironically there aren't a great many rocks to be found on-colony. Below the shots scroll the words "...Organised unrest on X-18999; tolls for calendar year: 23 dead, 37 wounded; Federation negotiations with colonial representatives on verge of collapse..." The news reads like Zepeda talks.

"What do you think would happen if the Federation left this colony?" Treize asks candidly, crossing his arms over his chest as a cheerfully frustrated woman in khaki pedal pushers tells him about how difficult it can be to get grass stains out of her kids' clothes. Completely inappropriate.

Zepeda doesn't even lift his head from his dinner, nor does he refrain from answering with a full mouth. "They won't. They say they will, but they won't. Not unless somebody bigger forces them. And there's nobody bigger." He dunks another chip in mayonnaise with unusual consideration. "Not yet."

"And if there were somebody bigger?" Treize presses.

"They'd have to be enormous. Situation still presents itself. Long as there are guns that can be pointed up, it'll never settle. Anyway, it's too late, now the colonists got the idea in their heads."

Retaliation. They're not afraid to push back anymore, because they've discovered that every time the Federation puts down an assembly with force, there are even more people at the next demonstration - cameras and protesters. The news gives them countless hours of air time, and whether that news makes it off-colony or not, the interest in the cause is everywhere and growing exponentially. They speak of injustice openly now, like a black family secret that's only now come out of the closet after decades of denial.

Treize puts his elbow on the table and holds his chin in his hand. He regards Zepeda for a stretch of silent curiosity before mentally shrugging and letting the question drop.

"What do you think would happen if Earth put down its weapons?"

"We'd find different weapons." There's a sharp crackling sound as Zepeda sucks the last of his soda from the bottom of his glass, loud enough to call the TV-hooked barkeep over to the table with a refill. "Economic. Political. Gotta kill the intent."

Exactly, Treize thinks. Absolutely exactly, and how refreshing, how uplifting to know that others can conclude the same thing he already has. It was last Thursday when it dawned rather plainly on him while sitting on his bench in his usual thinking place. Such a simple, ideologically elegant solution, one that won't work unless others are willing to buy into the possibility that it's a tenable option – even if it seems like practical and tactical insanity. It will require a leap of faith, a great offering of trust, and a plan more foolishly audacious than perhaps any in recent history. It might be impossible, and yet, it can't really be. Because people cannot continue this way, and there has to be another option. There must be. Because if there isn't, or if people resign to the belief that there isn't, then what's the point of anything that any of them do...?

When the proprietor comes by with Zepeda's cola, Treize turns in his beer mug and, after asking and determining that their vodka selection is undrinkable at best, he orders it with tonic to dull the predictable isopropyl aftertaste.

"Well then," Treize tells Zepeda with a smile, "we had better get to work on that."

Zepeda's laugh is real this time. "Figure out that one and everyone'll start screaming about the end times."

They order more food and talk into the night. The good company loosens Zepeda's tongue, and he spills to Treize everything he knows about X-18999, specifically about Dekim Barton. It's much more than Treize would have guessed him to know, and he's as impressed as he is disturbed by what's revealed to him. It's 2200 when Zepeda decides to pay a surprise visit to the Federation outpost. Treize picks up the tab and hits the streets, fed and stupid-happy and more than a little drunk.

Walking home, he looks up to what would be the sky on Earth and sees only washed out orange-grey, a reflection of city lights upon artless metal. He pulls his phone out of his pocket when he passes through Barton Plaza, one of the five places on the colony where one can consistently patch a cellular call to the outside. With cold fingers, he dials an extra-colonial code, then an Earth code, then country code, then a number he knows by heart. His chest constrict with anxiety when he hears a ring on the other end. He stops on the lawn, stalled when he reaches voicemail but not foiled. He redials the call and begins to walk in a large circle. Ring. Ring. Ring.

There's a muffle, then a deep, ragged sigh. "Merquise."

The voice stops Treize fast, because it's about an octave lower than he remembers it being. It strikes him then with hurricane force that it's been nearly six months since he's spoken with the person he just admitted to Leia was his closest friend, a final organic processing of something he's known intellectually for some time. What a shameful thing, inexcusable, something so inherently rude and disrespectful that he can barely imagine treating a stranger the way he's recently treated his family. His reasons, once so valid to him, are pale and sickly next to the reality of what they've excused.

"Milliardo..."

Treize regrets the slip the minute it leaves his lips, because his time on-colony has alerted him to the very real possibility that private communications are monitored by the colonists, if not also the Federation. There is a long pause then. Some more muffled sounds, a comforter shifting, perhaps. The click of a bed stand lamp.

"It's one in the morning, Treize."

Treize checks his chronometer. It seems he forgot to add three. "I'm sorry. You probably have to wake up soon."

"Two more hours. It's okay."

Treize draws a long white blank where he swore he once had something important to say. He begins pacing in earnest now, back and forth, breath expelling in visible puffs.

"So, how are you?" Zechs asks plainly, not unlike the way an adult coaxes words from a reticent child.

"I'm well." Treize wades through an awkward moment nagged by the feeling that he should be saying more. "Thank you."

"Are you back?"

"No."

"Are you ever coming back?"

Treize's smile is an uneasy one. "Of course I am."

"Don't scoff at me," Zechs rebounds sleepily. "You've been on that colony for five months. You say you're fine, and yet, you're still there."

"It is difficult to explain."

"Try."

Treize pauses and spins a slow 360 in place to see if the security patrol's got their eye on him yet. There's no one, and it's deathly quiet. But he's never been out this late alone, so he can't say what's normal. It doesn't seem right, though.

"I have been thinking things over," Treize tells him honestly.

"Like what?" Zechs asks, genuine interest budging into his tone.

"My career. What I'm doing, what I need to do."

"You've met somebody."

Treize almost sputters. "What?"

"You love being home, and if you wanted only to think, you would have done it there," Zechs points out gently. "You'd walk around in the woods with your face to the sky, listening to the snow crunch under your feet. So that tells me there's something else. Someone else."

Poetic, Treize thinks, and delightfully, irrefutably correct. He loves that sound as it carries through the crisp winter air on a cloudy day, trees above him climbing miles and miles, it seems, branches evergreen under heavy white. Zechs truly does know him, better than anyone who ever attempted the task. Better than his mother. Better than Leia.

"My staying here means nothing of the sort," Treize weakly volleys, a flat-out lie no matter how hard he tries to talk himself into it. He's not the sort to get caught up with girls at the expense of all else, whatever sort that is, some serial monogamist, bleeding-heart romantic. And while she's not the entire story, there's no skirting the fact that Leia has been the biggest part of his life for nearly half a year.

"What's her name?"

"Leia."

There's another very long pause during which Treize resides in a mild state of disbelief at his own admission, which dropped from his lips like a murder confession through an anonymous grated screen. He thinks perhaps that he should not have had so much to drink before calling. He hears more shifting on Zechs' end and then a sharply breathed laugh.

"Are you going to marry her?" Zechs speaks with an unbothered cool that those familiar with him know is not necessarily a positive sign. It's like a gale warning in that the signal flag itself means very little – and is actually rather nice to look at – unless one knows how to read it.

"Why would you even think that?"

"Well, you're not really giving me anything to go on." Zechs is waking up now, anger sloshing up in that stirringly deep voice of his. When did that happen? How could it possibly have happened so quickly? "What else can I assume?"

Contrary to every response that Treize knows would be appropriate in this situation, for everything he's put Zechs and his family through, he's still getting a little pissed off. "You should stop assuming anything."

"Then talk to me!" Zechs breaks then, and the barrier holding back every tortuously unanswered question drops like dead things spilling down a steep ramp. "What the hell's wrong with you, not calling anybody, not even mailing? We had to watch the news just to know you were okay, like a bunch of strangers. _Why_ couldn't you call? _Why_ couldn't you email? A text. Why not anything? Why are you hiding up there?"

Treize holds his hand palm-out in front of his chest, as though Zechs were standing there to see it. "Please calm down."

"Don't tell me what to do!"

The silence settles in massive space that separates them,tens and tens of thousands of kilometers of deadly vacuum. "I'm sorry," Treize tells him. And he is, because Zechs' justification is iron-clad. Treize hates being on this side of things.

"Don't you know it's because we love you?" Zechs utters between clenched teeth. "Do you think I'd waste my breath and hope if I didn't care about you?"

"No," Treize says truthfully, "I do not think you would."

"Good guess."

The booze, among other things, is making Treize's head swim in the most uncomfortable way, and the only reasonable solution that presents itself is to drop flat on his ass and fall back on the lawn with a small 'umph.' The ground seems to rotate back and forth in small half-circles that are at once interesting and nauseating.

"I heard that you beat my score," Treize murmurs close to the phone's mic. "I called to congratulate you."

"I get my choice of station, straight into platoon leadership, if I want," Zechs states neutrally.

"You absolutely should have your own platoon." Emphasis on the 'absolutely' part. Treize would give him an entire company, if he had the reach, and not because he's particularly confident in his his friend's skills. He's barely seen him in action. But it's a feeling Treize has or, at least, a wish. Because if this is going to be Zechs' life, he wants nothing more than for his friend to have everything. Even if he doubts the proportionality of the cost.

"General Catalonia is going to pin on my rank. Unless I want somebody different to do it."

"It would be a great honor to have him pin you."

"I'd rather it be you." There's a tenderness in the admission that lasts only as long as the sentence before solidifying into something verging on a threat. "But that means you have to be here in four days."

"I'll be there." It's as simple as that.

"If you promise me and you're not, I swear to God, I will never speak to you again."

"I will be there," Treize assures him as his hand passes over his forehead and then into his hairline. "I promise."

"I mean it, Treize. Never."

"I know you mean it."

Treize isn't sure how much longer they talk, but he guesses less than seven or eight minutes. When he hangs up, he moves seamlessly into using his phone to access the shuttle schedule. His eyes blur and cross as he navigates tiny and convoluted menus, but he finally uploads it.

Then he thinks about how he's going to tell Leia.

xXx

It's nearly midnight when Treize unlocks the front door of Leia's flat. He's got his show of control back in place, having spectacularly lost sight of it on the line with Zechs. He slowly turns the handle to preempt any excess noise.

"Have fun?"

He turns, carelessly knocking the door shut with the push of his heel as he does. Leia's sitting at the small table by the window, wearing the small things that pass for her pajamas, with a half-full bottle of wine and an empty glass in front of her. She's smiling at him, a long and finely curved line that lets him know that she's feeling just fine – or else, like him, she's putting on a masterful act.

"I did have fun," he confirms. "It was good to see Danny."

"He seems a little sleepy," Leia says, biting back a lazy grin, "but nice."

"I have something to tell you," he segues tactlessly.

"What, that you're going back to Earth?"

Treize's mouth falls open a little, which he passes off as a yawn that's quite poorly timed but not completely pantomimed. He rests his hands on his hips and tries to figure out what about his entrance gave him away. "How did you know?"

Leia's fingers twist around the stem of her glass. "I've been waiting for you to say something for a while now... but when I saw you with your friend, I had a feeling it would be sooner than later."

"The shuttle leaves tomorrow morning." Treize eyes the clock on the wall. "Rather, in five hours."

Her smile falls, and her lips part as if to sigh through them. She's twirling the glass now, spinning it idly between her thumb and forefingers until it slips from her grasp and drops onto the tabletop. Miraculously, it doesn't break. A deep frown hardens her face.

"You don't belong here anyway," Leia tells him matter-of-factly. "You never could. And you don't understand anything up here, even though you think you do."

Treize walks to where she's sitting and tosses his key onto the table. "You are the one who does not understand," he retorts, sub-zero. "And it is very distressing that you don't, because you are one of the few people in a position to do something about this place."

"Just go pack."

He snorts derisively and heads off to his room to do just that.

He yanks the closet door open and pulls his wadded issue bag from the far back of it. Clothes fall off hangers by quick, furious pulls and are crammed violently into the bottom of his duffel. Treize doesn't care that he's bound to finish the job in about five minutes, going at this rate. He doesn't care at all. He'll go back to the pub until it closes at zero-two and then ruck it to the space port when it opens at zero-three. Then he'll pass out on the shuttle and pretend thereafter that they had a better ending. He'll remember his time in space fondly – most of it really was good, after all. And he'll wake up at full gravity with a blinding headache, but it won't matter because he'll feel the real sun – not a mirror's projection of it – on his face. Even if he pukes the second he steps off the shuttle, because it's been so long since he's landed in one, he'll still be grateful that he's puking on a Belgian tarmac.

Treize spins around to go after the items in his dresser and runs straight into Leia before he can register her. It takes a second for the surprise to subside, only to be redoubled when she rips the bag from him and throws it on the floor.

"You're such a smug bastard," she spits. "Presumptuous, spoiled brat who's too big of a coward to even write his mother a letter."

"Get out of my way," he orders, squaring his jaw and shoulders.

"How dare you tell me what kind of person I should be. You didn't grow up here. You're a poser and a self-righteous interloper. You don't know anything about this colony, and you certainly don't know anything about my family."

"Says the dreamy little girl who can't even see that her father's funding the rebellion – "

Leia backhands him. Hard. Enough to whip his head to the left. Enough for his bangs to fly across his forehead and into his eyes. His mouth gapes open, and this time there's no way to disguise the utter, paralytic shock the expression represents.

Treize then feels he's watching himself, disembodied, as he rights his head and makes a grab for her. Her hands rise automatically in defense, so he takes her skinny forearms in a steel tight grip and pushes her until she falls back on the bed. She gasps, and there's fear in her eyes when he pins her arms above her head and kisses her roughly. A fractured thought rips through his mind, one that asks if he hasn't gone completely too far.

But soon enough she presses up against him, and he knows then that she's not trying to fight him off because she's also shoving her tongue in his mouth. He lets her go to unzip himself, and it's only a matter of ripping off those little shorts before he's fucking her. Because that's what it is – a loud, half-drunken fuck that barely lasts four minutes.

There's no holding when it's over. Treize is off her in one heartbeat and put back together in the next. Leia stays the way she is, lower half still dangling off the edge of the bed, a dim haze clouding her eyes, until he mechanically stoops down, picks up her bottoms, and drops them by her open hand. Turning away, he hears her slowly slide them back on, hears the mattress squeak a bit as she stands. She remains near the bed and blankly watches him make hasty rounds through the bedroom and adjoining bathroom until he's got everything he owns crammed in a bag that can barely fit it all. Treize then clasps it up, tosses it into the hallway like a bloated sack of wheat and, without so much as a comment on the last thirty minutes, pulls Leia into a tight hug.

It takes longer for her to respond to this move than his last, but it's scarcely any time before her arms come around his back with the same clinging desperation. It's also scarcely any time before she begins softly crying. Treize knows it's not only because of his leaving and what he's just done to her. She's crying for the people she couldn't save that day. For the chaos that has turned her home into an unpredictable battleground. For the faint part of her that perhaps almost believes what Treize said about her father.

"You are one strong woman," Treize whispers as he brushes her hair behind her ear, thinking not only of his throbbing face but of everything her character has indicated to him since he's known her. "And wickedly intelligent. I was wrong to suggest otherwise."

"I know what I am," Leia murmurs shakily into his shoulder. "It would take a lot more than you to make me doubt myself."

And that's what he loves about her.

"You may well be right about what I do not know," he admits softly, "but you may not be. All I ask is that you do not close yourself off to both possibilities."

She nods slowly, sniffles, and wipes her nose on his sweater.

"Thanks for that."

"Mmm. My pleasure."

They don't let go of each other for a long time.


	8. Chapter 7

See Prologue for notes.

This chapter eventually picks up where the prologue left off, which I've marked at the beginning of the section it applies to. So you may choose to re-read it to refresh your memory.

I hope you enjoy!

xXx

(Mid-August 189 – Day 0 + 11 months)

Treize is bent over his desk, pouring over SOP revisions proposed by his platoon leaders. It's an unusual procedure, soliciting unit regulation suggestions from subordinates, but Treize has learned that his young officers not only easily rise to the challenge, they also excel at pointing out loopholes, shortfalls, and redundancies. Smart bunch, he thinks with no minor hope for the future of the Corps. He's optimistic, especially now that he has new leadership under him. New opportunities, unthinkable, fantastic opportunities, strike out long paths for him that extend and extend.

"Run off base," Treize reads aloud from a questionnaire filled with neat lines of well-crafted, logical suggestions, the type he's learned to expect from the leader of his company's third platoon. The writing is small and precise, without a single flourish of excess, the script of someone for whom handwriting is an inconvenience and a cramping pain, requiring effort and concentration beyond the expression of thought.

"Yes, Sir," Zechs confirms, standing at rigid but effortless attention in front of his commander's desk.

Treize eyes his new-com first lieutenant mildly, with a secret smile hidden behind the skeptical slant of his mouth. Sell this to me, he thinks, projects, and challenges, all without uttering a word. He delights in testing Zechs. Pushing him, harder than he pushes the rest of his lieutenants. Because he now knows what Zechs can do and has wild thoughts about what he might be able to do if given the breadth. Treize thinks in that moment that he quite likes having his friend in his unit, so much that he begins to wonder how he managed without him.

"Don't you think that might pose a security threat?" Treize queries, looking above the edge of the paper and into shadowed eyes, ice-blue eyes bright with thought and interest that betray the hard set of his decreasingly androgynous face.

"Not for the area, Sir. I requested safety reports from the last five years from Lieutenant Nakagawa at DIS. There have been no episodes of aggression or questionable activity against soldiers or military civilians during that time period, save the protest outside the gate last year during which one of the security patrol jeeps was spit on by an individual. As a protective measure, soldiers would be paired in groups of two or more, perhaps in pre-designated run groups based on skill level."

"Why are you making this recommendation, Lieutenant?"

"I believe it will improve unit morale. This is a beautiful area. Additionally, the variation in grades will be a boon to each soldier's physical training scores."

Treize stares until he gets the answer he wants.

"The world should see us," Zechs continues. "The Specials. They need to see us move. Train. For their reassurance." He pauses, expression cool as he stares Treize back unflinchingly. "And, of course, for their intimidation."

Treize lets his smile break through, but only enough of one to signal to Zechs that he can stop justifying his recommendation.

"I will take your suggestion under consideration," he says noncommittally as he slides the questionnaire to the side and folds his hands on the desk. "Now, is there anything – "

Treize is halted by the buzz of the cell on his desk. Not a call, he can tell by the pattern of the vibration. He glares it down and lets it sit, because he hates being interrupted. Especially when he's in a meeting. Especially when he's in a meeting with one of his subordinates. Especially when that subordinate is Zechs.

But then come creeping the thoughts of 'what if.' What if it's Renzetti? What if it's notification of an action drill? What if it's his mother? Uncle? Any number of superiors or junior officers in need? Part of being issued a government cell is being accountable to everyone, anywhere, at any hour. Obnoxious status symbol, coveted only by idiots who loathe their own personal time.

"Excuse me."

Treize checks the touch screen: 'Call me as soon as you get this. Leia.' It's followed by a callback number. He freezes, caught unaware by this request from the distant nowhere where Leia's kept herself since he left. Abrupt. Not even his name for a preamble, which might have been nice. It's the wording that gives him pause, short and impersonal, and he wonders if perhaps a situation has developed on-colony.

A series of violence-oriented speculations begin to percolate in his mind. More riots? He should have checked the news, because he's been abysmally remiss about keeping up on it. It was habitual for a while, getting updates. It made him feel like he was still connected by a thin tether, as thin as a broadcast signal. There could be an evacuation. It was always an option, in the direst of straights. But wouldn't he have heard from internal Specials channels? Certainly he would have found out already if things have gotten that bad...

"Sir?"

Treize's head jerks up. Zechs' whitish eyebrows are gathered above the rim of his sunglasses.

"At ease," Treize orders as he reluctantly sets the phone back on the desk. "And take those off."

Zechs doesn't go to ease, and he doesn't remove his eyewear. Instead, he tenses. "Why?"

"Because you are indoors. And because I don't like them."

"You can't have it both ways," Zechs slings back easily.

To Treize, there's nothing mysterious about the intent of the statement. It's a sharp jab to a soft spot that Zechs knows damn well is soft. He marvels with no amusement at how nasty Zechs can be when provoked.

"Something has come up," Treize tells him, gambling that his dismissal of the comment will come across as maturity and not weakness. "We have to cut this short."

The tiniest of satisfied smiles lifts the left corner of Zechs' mouth. "I understand."

"I'll make it up to you," Treize mollifies unnecessarily. "If you meet me in the chow hall at 1900, we can talk about your training schedule then."

"Over dinner." The smirk is pulled even harder, and one of Zechs' hands slides forward from behind his back, brushes his leg, and touches lightly - discreetly, covertly, as if fulfilling a high-stakes dare – at the deep mahogany of Treize's desk.

Treize's eyes track that short-nailed fingertip as it runs along a decorative cut in the wood. "If there's nothing else immediate, you're dismissed," he tells his subordinate quietly.

The bold finger stops, lingers for a still moment, and disappears into a swiftly-hidden fist. With a snap to attention and a crisp turn on his heels, Zechs starts for the door until, seeming to forget something, he spins back around and addresses Treize once more.

"Oh, and congratulations on your promotion."

Treize takes his phone in hand again and settles back in his chair with an expression of distracted not-quite-surprise. "What makes you think I'm getting promoted?"

"Word gets around."

"I only found out this morning."

Zechs shrugs one camo-clothed shoulder, the best and most detailed explanation he has for the rampant gossip machine that churns the social tides of the Specials Corps. "Where will you be going?"

Treize rolls his chin down, back to the message that's got him electrified with suppositions. "What do you mean?"

"Majors don't command companies," Zechs points out with a matter-of-fact tone suggesting his fresh schooling on – and detailed attention to – command structure. "I assume you're leaving the installation - " There's a pause to regroup after his voice breaks. "That message certainly has your interest."

Treize's attention fixes dead-set on Zechs. Eyes narrowed, the look on Treize's face is a warning. Too close, it says, bolstered by nerves, because these two worlds are not supposed to intersect like this. Earth is Earth and colony is colony. And at this moment, Zechs is much too close to Leia. He's in the same room with her, questioning her presence there. He doesn't know it, but it's all the same to Treize as if they were standing side by side. He's prodded by the fear of being found out, like a teenager with a girl stashed under his bed, because that's one part of his life where Zechs is not welcome. Maybe only because Treize isn't sure what his time with Leia meant. What it was and is. What it could have been.

"What does it say?" Zechs repeats.

"I'm taking the brigade."

"_This_ brigade? As a major? Who approved that?"

"The chief of staff."

Zechs tilts his head, unbelieving. "I have a hard time believing that Noventa signed off on something like that."

"_Field Marshal _Noventa appointed General Catalonia to handle all command arrangements for the Specials Corps. He's out of it."

"That wasn't very smart of him. He'll never get it back. Hasn't he figured out yet that - "

"I'm through discussing this with you," Treize cuts off, tone carefully unmoved.

Zechs is still as a frown, small but hard as steel, mars his pretty face. Then he turns back for the door and strides forward. "I'll leave you to your phone," he grinds out forcefully.

"I'll see you – "

The door slams hard enough for Treize to feel through the thick soles of his boots.

" – tonight," Treize mutters. After a numb moment to shake off the blow-back, he pulls up Leia's message and dials her number.

xXx

Treize swallows hard. His hand, unbidden, ghosts over his lips. His collar is stranglingly tight and digging up under his chin.

"When?" he asks detachedly.

"The first of December," Leia tells him.

Treize's stalling mind does a quick, shameful calculation and determines that it's too late for all this to go away. And there's a reason behind it, he's beginning to disjointedly grasp. There's a reason why he's only finding out now, not that he could have done anything if he'd learned of it sooner. The message Leia's sending is resoundingly clear: mine. Yours too, but mostly mine.

"It's definitely yours," she preempts, not seeming to realize that it's not necessary to do so.

Because he knows that she has no reason to lie about it. She's not a gold digger. In fact, her net worth is orders of magnitude greater than his, if one were to count all Barton Corporation subsidiaries. And it's certainly nothing to do with his title, which means nothing to her except a good laugh.

"Why didn't you tell me when you found out?" Treize questions, incredulous frustration creeping into his tone. "And why haven't you contacted me once since I left?"

The latter could be just as readily applied to him. His return was a whirlwind, a frenzied crash of celebration, pomp, and an outrageous amount of paperwork that Koh couldn't attend to in his absence for so many ridiculous and dubious reasons, none of which had to do with her aptitude or responsibility. Finding that she'd been blatantly ignored by the people entrusted to help her in his absence, Treize went on a blood-and-guts campaign that spanned from formal complaints to _tête_-_à-tête_ confrontations in the dark reaches of the Officers' Club. He cornered one captain at the paper towel dispenser in the men's room and told the man that he not only owed his XO an apology, but also that he would be volunteering to coordinate her upcoming promotion ceremony and after-party. It wasn't an order. It couldn't be. But the man agreed without a word edgewise if only because he had the sense to figure that Treize was also due for promotion soon and might be someone worth sucking up to.

Leia Barton was light years from his thoughts, especially after he used the momentum of his hailed return to bargain Zechs into his unit as a subordinate, something he never would have gotten away with before coming back from L3 a hero. He did think of her occasionally, typically when he was alone, in the abstract way that one thinks of the shape of time. His recollections were fond, sometimes colored by the light tug of longing, but that too began to fade as the months ticked off and still nothing to ground what they had in his current reality.

Until now.

"I don't expect anything," Leia says, ignoring his last words, just coldly enough to perhaps disguise some very real expectation that she can't bring herself to admit.

"I asked you if we should use something," Treize reminds her, fingers digging into the armrest of his chair. "You remember that, don't you? The first time."

When they went to his room from the couch. He uttered it with his mouth against her neck. He even raised his head and looked her in the eye to be sure. He'd even been prepared for her to say 'yes.' Because the single thing his mother said to him that even remotely touched the topic of sex was that he would be inarguably expected to put a ring on the finger of any girl – no matter how stupid or ugly – that he impregnated. She made it sound revolting enough to imbue in him no minor obsession with such details.

"You told me not to worry," he reiterates.

There's a long pause on Leia's end. Treize's eyes widen when he hears multiple boot steps and loud, Friday afternoon chatting outside his door. Someone laughing – Lubeck – and Koh's husky shout for them to shut up. The steps recede amid whispers he can't decipher.

"I wasn't lying," Leia says at last.

Treize sighs and pushes hard with his feet to roll his chair out from his desk. He slouches deep, legs splayed in an ungentlemanly fashion. "Were you even on anything?"

"At first. Until – "

"Until we started sleeping together?" he interrupts crisply.

"Until I came to the understanding that you would go back to Earth, no matter what."

Treize straightens sharply, and the energy carries him all the way to standing. "Why did you do that?" He's keeping himself under control. He's honestly trying quite hard, and he's not certain that it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the woman he's irate with is carrying his child. "I don't understand this."

Leia makes a noise. It sounds like a tiny laugh or a breathed smile. "I never wanted a wedding," she confesses contemplatively. "I thought that was odd, when I was younger. I never dreamed of a husband or a diamond or any of that. When I got older, I had a few boyfriends. Some were even serious ones - "

"Please get to the point," Treize encourages tersely, not in the mood for it, as he walks to the bay window on the east side of his office that affords a charming view of the dining facility.

"I never wanted to settle. With anyone," she explains, and then the whimsy drains from her voice, leaving behind unadorned factuality. "But I always wanted to be a mother."

Treize closes his eyes tightly and presses his thumb and fingers into the sockets as if it could block the inevitable unveiling of the horrifying conclusion. "Oh God, don't tell me that."

"It wasn't a diabolical scheme, if that's what you're thinking. But it was an opportunity, and I didn't ignore it."

"I didn't think you were like that," Treize tells her, choked with disbelief. He's never figured himself as one to be used. Not by anyone. And he certainly never anticipated being used... like that. It's completely beyond any behavior he would ever imagine from her.

"When else would I find someone like you," Leia tries to explain, "handsome, brilliant, and completely uncommitted to anything but his career?"

Treize's aggravated agitation is physical now, and he's pacing, stopped from kicking over the garbage can only by the strange grace of paranoia, which tells him that any loud noise will draw more unoccupied weekend-watchers within earshot of his conversation.

"I don't know what to say, except that what you did is just..." Treize clenches his fist like he's crushing the whole scenario into oblivion. "...Sick. Wrong. Completely..." Mentally flailing, he sucks in a deep breath. "How can you even rationalize it?"

"I don't need to," she informs him frankly. "It's already happened, even if I were to feel bad about it."

"Well, perfect for you, getting precisely what you want. What about me? Why even say anything if you don't want anything to do with me?"

"I didn't say I wanted nothing to do with you. And I thought you'd want the opportunity to be a part of her life."

Her.

Treize stops fast. Purses his lips. The conflagration of unchecked energy is sucked of all the oxygen feeding it. He flops down on the couch at the far end of his office and absorbs those three letters. And Leia keeps talking, but he doesn't hear any of it because he's let his phone hand drop to the cushion.

Her. It doesn't go any farther than that, and no word so terrifying as 'daughter' emerges from the fog of thin static that's replaced all coherent thought. He looks out the window, the smaller one, the one that shows him something green. Beautiful day. Friday. Okay. There is such a thing as Her now. Okay. Everything is quiet, and it really is so beautiful outside.

"Treize? Treize?"

He lifts his arm. He speaks the thought before it clears the filters in his brain. "I want to be part of it."

"Would you like me to call you with updates?"

"About her, yes."

Leia sighs. He imagines her curled up on her own couch, the one he used to lie on. He imagines a pensive look on her face, accented perhaps with a tinge of remorse Maybe she wishes she hadn't done what she did. Maybe she was afraid to call him.

And she should have been, because he's so furious that he's past lashing out. It's like white light behind his eyes.

"You're very upset with me, aren't you?" she asks softly.

"This isn't about you anymore," Treize edges out, "and it won't ever be again."

"Wasn't that the way it was bound to be?"

"No." He unlatches the fastening at his collar, because he's choking on something like irony, or perhaps it's cosmic justice. He's always gotten what he's wanted, with remarkably few exceptions. This, he thinks in broad metaphysical terms, is probably the cost. "Things between us might have been different."

"Not a chance."

Treize can hear her smiling. He doesn't understand why she would smile about something like that.

"Keep me updated," he requests.

Then he hangs up on her.

xXx

(Late October 189 – Day 0 + 16 months)

"Did you get my email?" Leia asks him brightly.

Treize hunches over his laptop, even though the picture is reasonably sized. "I am looking at it right now," he mutters into his phone. "You're huge. And... "

It's a profile shot of Leia holding a camera up to the mirror in her bathroom. Her appearance is almost laughable, because she's still just as small and thin as she was except for an enormous bubble of unborn person jutting like a beach ball from her stomach.

"And what? And my boobs?"

Treize casually laughs it off like a joke, lamely masking embarrassment at being both predictable and pegged for his predictability. "That was not what I was about to say."

"Did you see the other photo?"

Treize clicks on the other attachment. A grey, fuzzy blob with grey, fuzzy appendages. The name 'Barton' at the bottom-left corner. "It is not really a photo."

"But amazing, isn't it?" Leia says excitedly. "That's her."

"Hm... Is that...?" Treize touches a finger to his chin and squints. "Hm."

"I wish I had a picture of you right now."

"Why?"

"Are you still all right with this?" she asks earnestly. "I want this to be okay with you."

Treize gathers a thin blanket around himself and plants his socked feet on the coffee table in front of him. "Yes. Only it's..." He coughs through a throat scratch, the remnants of a cold that has dogged him for over a week. It's probably the flu, irksome in its severity and longevity, but 'cold' sounds less nefarious, so he contents himself with that. "It does not seem quite real."

"Have you told your mother?"

"No." He says it with a distant distaste that leaves no room for debate, or even hope. "I do not plan to."

"Would it really be that bad?"

"Yes. Unequivocally, yes."

Leia's answer is a disappointed one. "That's too bad. She might want to know she's going to be a grandmother."

"Mm," Treize murmurs skeptically. "Well, perhaps someday."

"I'm thinking of names again. What do you think?" Metal cookware clatters, punctuated by a yelp of surprise and a breathed curse. "Ugh. Gross. I know you don't want to choose the first name."

"It is not that I don't want to, but the names I like are rather suspiciously Russian."

"You could choose her middle name."

"Oh, yes." He had forgotten about that cultural note. "You have those, don't you?"

"I think you should pick it."

Treize smiles thinly at the dream-like quality of the entire conversation, a hallmark of anything and everything to do with Her. "All right."

It shouldn't feel all right, he thinks. He shouldn't really be okay with it. Because Treize thrives on being in control, and having an illegitimate child with a woman hundreds of thousands of kilometers away and who's not his wife – not even his girlfriend – does not support this prerogative.He should be railing against it, or, at least, ignoring it completely. He should have said that he didn't care, because the option was wide open for him to do just that. He shouldn't be awestruck over sonograms and helping to choose a name. Shouldn't be.

But he is, and as beyond sanity as it sometimes seems to him, he feels with every step that this is the way it really should be.

"Are you feeling okay?" Leia asks, concerned.

"A bit tired, but nothing a good night's sleep won't mend."

She laughs, sweetly, and not without tremendous affection. "You're such a liar."

xXx

(Late November 189 – Day 0 + 20 months – immediately proceeding Prologue)

He really was fine with it, once the idea sank in. Once they decided on the rules. Once it became obvious that she wouldn't say anything and neither would he. Not to his mother. Not to her father. Not to Zechs. Not to her brother. It would be their secret, and he eventually found some comfort in that. He even forgave Leia, because there was no point dwelling on her motives and, in truth, it was nice to have her in his life again. He really was fine with it.

...Until three days ago. Until he went on the net and bought a shuttle ticket, the soonest flight, which was still three days too late. Until Leia called him and he heard his newborn daughter crying in the background. His daughter. No longer cloistered in a state of unborn potential, she is real. Mariemaia Elena Barton is real.

And it terrifies him.

Treize frowns. The selection of toys sprawled before him is daunting, a visual cacophony of primary colors, letters, numbers, and pictures of children of varying ages presumably enjoying whatever garbage is being marketed. Treize's hands flex and unflex, as though faced with an adversary of especially ill repute.

In another aisle, children are yelling just because they can, squealing, giggling, rolling across the floor on something with plastic wheels. He feels himself sweating.

What, exactly, does one buy for a newborn baby? What does a newborn need? What does it do but cry and eat and grow out of its clothes? And what could he possibly get that wouldn't be blatantly insulting to Leia? As though she wouldn't be prepared. As though she wouldn't already have a fully dressed, stocked, and accessorized nursery.

Alphabet blocks? Simple. Plain. Obvious and premature. Maybe next year. God, did he just think that? The Baby Genius Busy Baby Rattle promotes gross motor coordination and auditory development. He won't buy that on the name alone.

He can't show up with nothing, because that would be tasteless and rude. His mind sidetracks sharply, because he needs the diversion, and he thinks of how his name would conjugate into a patronymic. If she were even taking his name. If they were offering any indication at all that she's his. He decides that it would be ugly and awkward, anyway.

Picking her middle name was a relatively inactive process. Candidates would float like clouds through his consciousness at the oddest times. PT. Meetings. Piloting. In that loose space between awake and asleep. He thought of Elena, pervertedly enough, right after he killed somebody during a mobilization in Belarus. Right after acknowledgement and right before regret, there was Elena.

A giddily mobile toddler blazes down his aisle trailed by a smiling, chiding father. Treize wonders if he could ever have that look on his face.

Baby Bouncy Chair. Busy Bee's Bumbling Baby Bonanza.

"Can I help you with anything?" comes a disinterested drawl from over his right shoulder.

Treize turns and stares the clerk back, wide-eyed. Deer-in-headlights.

"I have a baby," he blurts out.

The clerk's manicured eyebrow rolls up and back down. "Congratulations." Treize can't tell whether or not he's being sarcastic. "How old?"

"New," Treize explains quickly. "Very new. I want to buy her something."

"O-kay. Uh…" The clerk turns towards the shelves, and his expression resembles Treize's as he regards the choices from behind his long, black-dyed bangs. Treize hears the young man's tongue ring click against his teeth before he picks up a long box that has a picture of a baby lying underneath an overhanging 'Action Station.' There's a mirror on it, a paddle that might be able to turn, and a button that probably makes some noise.

"We've been selling a lot of these," 'Ace' tells Treize, itching at a barely concealed neck tattoo that looks red and fresh. "But newborns don't do much, you know? They're pretty boring."

Treize takes the box from the clerk who, he suspects, might have a year or two on him. He has no feelings for this 'Action Station,' but he hopes feigned interest will get Ace out of his swiftly imploding personal space.

"Thanks," Treize says with a curt nod. "I think I'll take it."

"Cool," Ace says with unexpected sincerity, ducking his head. "Good luck with your kid." His skate shoes squeak as he shuffles off, probably to sneak out for a smoke.

Treize turns the box in his hands. How could he possibly show up with this? He checks the price. Fifteen credits? There's no way. No way.

His desire to leave the store is mountainous and too pressing to ignore anymore. He lays the box back on the shelf, turns on his heels, and moves to the exit as quickly as he can without advertising to the world how frantically his mind is reeling.

The air feels fresh, even though it's not. It's warm, the kind of temperature that Earthers say thanks for, a sure sign that the weather system is down. Treize heads back to Barton Plaza, back to his bench on that thick lawn and under that deliberate tree. His old place. It says 'Welcome back.' It says 'Settle here, weary new fathers.'

He does. He distracts himself by rolling the sleeves of his black button-down shirt up his forearms. He then brushes his hair back off his forehead, reminds himself to breathe, and then, when his blood is no longer jackhammering in his ears, he slowly cranes his neck.

City, city, and city. His daughter will grow up here. She won't know a Russian winter. A Mediterranean summer. The heart-stalling majesty of Victoria Falls.

Or will she? She could. He could take leave, and she and Leia could come to Earth. They could travel together, a strange little family seeing the world together. It really could happen, he thinks. The world is a very big place. And she should know the planet he loves so much. She should know her history. She should know him.

And she will. He's decided that quite easily. It's the strongest thing anchoring him right now, the most important personal agreement keeping him from walking back to the shuttle port and wasting himself stupid in the lounge until his flight leaves.

He does like this colony. But if things ever get extremely bad, which they certainly could, Treize will take care of things. Even if everyone finds out his secret because of it. So what if they do? He's on the fast track to commanding the entire Corps, he's already plainly negotiated that with his uncle. And since he was initiated into OZ and Romefeller three and four months ago respectively, both factors of his battle performance, his family's decent name, and Catalonia's plans for him, the threat of being exposed as a teenage father seems petty and toothless to him now. He certainly wouldn't be the first in history, not even the first in the Foundation.

Well, perhaps he's not there yet. Not just yet, not the type of bulletproof he'd need to be to weather that degree of fallout. It's the paradox of power, because there's a certain level at which virtually any sin can be forgiven. With the right spin. With the right public appreciation. No, he's not there yet. But he hopes – he's sure – that one day he will be.

He checks his chronometer and hops to his feet. Moving at a good clip, Treize hurries off to make one last stop before going meet his daughter for the first time.

Xxx

Leia greets him in a long t-shirt and black leggings. Her hair is pulled back, and her eyes look tired but the same tranquil shade they ever were. She pulls him into an easy hug that feels warm and familiar. He really has missed her.

"Come in," she beckons as she slowly loosens her hold on him. Her expression is brilliant.

As they walk through the apartment, Treize scans each room they pass through for a baby that could be anywhere, like an enemy crouched in the undergrowth. He's keyed up like he's on patrol, nervousness trying to burrow a hole in the lining of his stomach. Leia leads him to the table, where she's set out two cups and a teapot.

"It's so good to see you," Leia tells him as she pours his tea. "I know I should be drinking decaf, but I'm dying here. I have to have just a little."

"I won't tell the caffeine police," he reassures as lightly as he can, which comes out sounding rather silly on top of the stress, "though I've read it passes on."

Leia cups her hands over her mouth. "Oh my God, you've been reading!" she exclaims, intensely amused.

Treize feels heat in his face. "There is nothing wrong with that."

"Of course not," she laughs. "No. It's, well, it's quite fantastic. I never imagined you'd be so interested."

"What did you think I would do?"

She searches his face, his intelligent eyes, the slightly odd shape of them, the mouth now perpetually snagged in an aloof smirk, even when she knows he's anything but aloof at this moment. Strong jaw. Pale, but by genes, not sickness. He only partially resembles the Treize Khushrenada she met last year. "I don't think it's worth talking about what you might have done, but I'll say that this is really wonderful, having you here."

"I have something for you," Treize tells her, pulling his black leather wallet from his back pocket. From it, he removes a piece of plastic no different in appearance from a credit card, something he picked up on the way from Barton Plaza. He hands it to her.

"A shuttle card?" she gleans, mouth twisted in mild confusion.

"I already prepaid a trip to Earth for both of you. It expires in a year. I expect you to use it."

Leia looks up suddenly, cautiously hopeful. "Does this mean you've told your family?"

He shifts in his chair. "No, but we could meet somewhere. Anywhere you'd like. Except home."

"I'd like that very much." She rubs her thumb over it with a soft smile. "Thank you."

"Of course."

Leia's quiet then, and it's clear from the way she's fidgeting with the ring on her right middle finger that she's hesitating to say something. It pulls at her lips like a nervous tick.

"I want to tell you something, and it's very important. I couldn't tell you over the phone."

Treize tenses, mostly in the shoulders, and then he's afraid that his tentative optimism about their continuing relationship has been misplaced. Everything with this baby has worked out only because of what their relationship has become. It's good this way, workable, right in a way that their relationship before wasn't, if only because the former base of it was his alienation from his life on Earth. Don't say it, he thinks. Please.

"What is it?"

"After I quit the hospital, I asked my father to let me look over the books. For a refresher, I explained, because I've been out of school for a while now and haven't touched a general ledger in years. I told him that I want to work for him, after the baby's born, like I was supposed to all along. I even turned your old room into an office."

Treize breathes an audible sigh of relief through his nose. "I suppose he must have been happy to hear that. Wait, how old are you?" He's never even asked, and something about that strikes him as extremely funny.

"Old enough for you to be considered a naughty boy," she teases, at which Treize chokes a bit on his tea.

"Anyway," Leia begins again, "he was thrilled, because he was trying to get me to leave the hospital since the moment I set foot there. 'It's below you,' he used to say, which is total rubbish. So I began looking over the stock performance, balance sheets, financial statements, board meeting minutes, everything. Because I was quite content to lie on the couch all day with my tea cup – herbal, thank you – balanced on Mari's poor little head or rump, I'm not sure, and I had to have something to pass the time."

She speaks with a breathless exuberance, fresh, glowing, and thrumming with life. It's different than any way he's seen her before.

Treize gives a disbelieving smile. "I know when I am bored I typically think about my unit's fiscal readiness."

Though, actually, he has been doing a bit with money the past month. He hired an accountant and went thoroughly over his own family's books to determine from where he could funnel money without anybody noticing. There are some dark corners, places his mother would never touch, especially with her limited interest in how her lifestyle is funded. He scrounged up enough liquid funds to establish a trust for his daughter, into which he's putting annuities from his own trust fund, living instead on his not insubstantial salary. An odd thing, really, living off of a salary after so many years of having it drop unnoticed into a pool six digits long.

"I like the financial component," Leia says, "because it's actually quite interesting, when I started to make some sense of it. And, well." Her demeanor shifts noticeably as she folds her leg under herself. She taps her fingernail against the rim of her cup with a serious frown. "I think you were right," she admits flatly. "About my father."

Her disturbance is reflected in Treize's face. "Are you certain?"

"Not positively, but fairly. Things do not add up. Money disappears, rematerializes, changes hands, and I know, I can tell when I put it all together, that a significant amount is leaking out unaccounted for. I can't imagine where else it could be going, unless he's a secret philanthropist, which somewhat defeats the purpose of philanthropy."

"I know how he feels about the Federation," Leia continues. "I've always known how he's actually felt. I suppose I never thought he would act on it like this. With such violence." She shrugs weakly. "I don't know what to do," she says under her breath.

Treize sits back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. "I wonder, did he think you wouldn't find it?"

"Or did he _want _me to find it?"

"Perhaps he's waiting to see what you will do."

Leia shakes her head. "I didn't want to know. And I don't support it. Not at all. That's not the right way to do things. That's not the way to make this a better place to live. And I'm sorry to talk of depressing things, but I had to tell you. At the least to apologize for slapping you. That was uncalled for."

"You might stay on it," he persuades, consciously avoiding any talk of that particular night. "See if you can find the source. If you can put together anything conclusive, if it bothers you that much, you can go to the authorities. Or the shareholders. I'm not certain which repercussion would be worse." Treize pauses while he entertains another unsettling potential. "Unless they are all in on it, too."

"I'm not sure I could do that, when it comes down to it," Leia states forthrightly.

"If it gets bigger," Treize stresses, leaning forward, "if he's funding something bigger than car bombs and communications blackouts, we need to know."

"And who's 'we'?" Leia asks with the skeptical upturn of her nose. "The Federation?"

"There are others who would better handle such an event," Treize explains cryptically.

The intelligence core of OZ with the concentrated force of the Specials. Options that were never tenable before will soon be viable. There's a new power dynamic slowly priming to emerge on Earth, and a wide-scale colonial rebellion might be just the catalyst it needs to push forward. It excites Treize just to think of it, because it represents his future. It is his future, the one of his own making.

"I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing." She makes the decision sound simple, dismissive perhaps as a form of coping. "I can't decide anything until I get to a point where I have to."

Neither says anything for a few moments, and it's in the absence of conversation that Treize remembers why he's there. Aren't babies supposed to cry? Coo and gurgle? All he hears, though, is the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

"Does your father know that she's mine?" Treize questions, having guessed at the answer already. An easy conclusion, one her brother might also likely have made. "I know you didn't tell him, but he must suspect."

"He knows. He's never said as much, but it's pretty obvious, considering the timing."

"Did you mean it when you said you never wanted to settle with anybody?" Treize asks out of what he thinks is nowhere, which is really out of a recurring thought that he hasn't pinned down and owned yet.

It's a question Leia looks surprised to hear. "I did. I do. But I wish..." She chews carefully on what she's about to say, framing the order and tone of her words with precision. "I sometimes wish it would have worked out with us. And that's much more than I've felt about anyone else."

Where either of them to budge in either direction, perhaps they could have been something. Maybe even something incredible. Maybe true partners, equals in the rarest sense. Maybe she could have been the one. Maybe. When her face lights up and she leans in and reaches across the table, resting her hand next to his tea, he thinks, he wishes, that she could be it.

"Do you want to see her?" she whispers, smiling.

Treize unconsciously holds his breath, like taking the plunge off a cliff that he'll never be able to ascend again. The end of something that couldn't be so trite or grossly mislabeled as innocence. He doesn't have a name for it.

"Yes."

Leia points backwards over her shoulder. "She's in the room across from mine."

xXx

Treize is unspeakably relieved when she doesn't offer to accompany him, perhaps because he's feeling particularly self-conscious already without what he would perceive as her scrutiny. For all the times he's limped down this hall, which he no longer does, he's never seen it quite like this. It seems narrower and closing in, like it's drawing him to a single, inescapable point in the universe. He passes by his old room or, rather, the office, which has been sanitized of any trace that he was ever there. The only sign that he lived here for five months is now sleeping in the next room down. The door is ajar, opened just a tantalizing peek. His hand is steady on the knob as he pushes it open.

The room is dim from the drawn curtains. A changing table and dresser sit to his right and left. Clean lines. Soft wood. Simple color scheme, light and gender indifferent. Directly across the room from him is a crib, high and deep, railed and lined on the inside with tall, padded bumpers. Nervous anticipation heightens his senses to an acuity he's only experienced before in combat.

Treize closes the door behind him and leans back heavily against it. He's quiet. Absolutely so. His breath cycles shallowly. He listens again.

And he hears it, the smallest, faintest sound. An inhale through tiny nostrils and an exhale, quick, because a baby's respiration rate averages 30-60 breaths a minute, he recalls, a pace he'd pass out trying to match. Treize has neonatal statistics and trivia well at hand. He's done more than read a book; he's fastidiously researched the subject, at his apartment, off the Federation network, where no trace could be made between him and this most unlikely and suggestive topic. Newborn sleeps 16 hours a day or more. Can see objects 8-12 inches away. Has stepping/rooting/startle reflexes. Prefers black-and-white contrast patterns to color. Can imitate facial expressions after three to four days.

But Treize's compendium of facts means little with his back against the door, frozen by trepidation, head buzzing like the refrigerator. He has to tell himself to step away, will it determinately, not unlike the first time he jumped out of a plane, scared and clinging to the aircraft doorway. How unnatural it'd felt to do something like that.

He presses his palms against the door and pushes away, steps soft on the carpet. It takes barely anything to get there, to the edge, where he dares that first look, hands grasping the rails.

Treize appears his age when he sees her for the first time. Perplexed. Unguarded. What a tiny thing, his mind repeats hazily. What a tiny girl.

She's asleep, with a white knit blanket pulled up her little body. Her arms are curled up to her chest, hands in fat baby fists. In that moment, he knows she's his in a way that's unrelated to logic and belief. She's too small and chubby to look like either of them, though he thinks her hair does have a reddish tint to it.

Treize's finger twitches, and when he clears a scratch in his throat, maybe on purpose, her hairless brows draw together and release. He lets go of the rail and wipes the sweat from his palms onto his pant legs. He then bites his lip in as he reaches into the crib and draws down the blanket. Everything about her is soft and coiled, and the onesie she wears is still a bit big on her. For another week, he thinks. Newborn baby eats 8-12 times a day, doubling birth weight at 6 months.

Gently, so gently, he slides his fingers around her ribcage, under her arms, and lifts her from the mattress. His face is pinched in a look of utter concentration until he has her settled in the crook of his elbow, her head fully supported, just like he's read. She squirms, makes a tiny bothered whimper, and heaves a baby sigh before relaxing again.

Treize makes no attempt to control the slow smile that spreads widely across his lips. He is absolutely, goofily smitten, a look nobody has or ever will see on his face.

"Hello, Marishka."

He will be something to her. She will know who he is, and she will know that he loves her.

Because he does. In that instant, he does.


	9. Epilogue

See Prologue for notes.

Well, this is the end! I hope you've enjoyed it, because I've had a good time writing this little experiment. Thanks so much to LoveyouHateyou (the best – find him in my Favorite Authors section) and Masamune Reforged for the wonderful support and feedback. It means so much to me! Also, many thanks to those who've added me to their Favorites lists. I truly appreciate it.

xXx

(December 20th, 191 – Day 0 + 3 years, 3 months)

Today Treize receives an email. From Dekim Barton. A blunt, insensitive pair of paragraphs. Attached are a few news clips, small things, purposefully vague to preempt unease. One obituary. Proof. Documentation. Everything's been taken care of. Treize's assistance and/or participation is not required nor requested. Everything is under control now. Dekim is most aggrieved. Condolences are offered.

Treize only reads it once before he mechanically deletes it. And he sits there, staring at his computer's default desktop, 'Classified Information Ready' printed unattractively in the middle of it in lieu of something nice. He sits there for a good few minutes before losing it. Quietly. Because he's at work. He gets it together enough to cancel his 1130 meeting. Then his 1300 meeting. And his 1500 one. Then he gives the division an unscheduled holiday the next day, a Friday. Because he wants the space, because he has work to do and wants to do it without interruption. Because today, after finding out, he can't even see straight, let alone do anything at all of substance.

So he lies down on his office couch. Stays there. Looks nowhere, throat tightening unbearably from time to time. His hand, shaking, sometimes rises to touch his brow, where the pressure is the worst. When he thinks of something she once did or said, his chin quivers then. Uncontrollably. He grits his teeth as he cries in absolute, cruelly restrained silence.

This goes on in hard, unpredictable cycles until Zechs knocks on his door at 1645. Treize knows it's Zechs, first from the knock, then from the card key override that lets him in uninvited. Treize is still on the couch when Zechs walks in, his eyes bloodshot but dry, open but inattentive.

"So suddenly I have tomorrow free," Zechs grouches without so much as a greeting. "It seems that the entire Second Division has been given a holiday."

"How unusual," Treize mutters dispassionately.

Zechs comes closer with the heavy steps of an athletic sixteen-year-old verging on 182 solid centimeters tall. "You canceled everything. You never cancel anything."

"I thought the soldiers would enjoy an extra day leading into Christmas block leave."

"Very benevolent of you."

"Is there something you need?" Treize thinks to add more, like 'besides to complain,' but the rest of the question dies unspoken behind his lips.

Zechs pulls off his sunglasses and flings them dramatically onto Treize's meticulously organized desk. "I need to understand why I'm standing here in your office and not staging the test Aries for tomorrow's scheduled, excuse me, _formerly _scheduled transporter free-fall."

"I gave you the day off," Treize returns shortly, closing his eyes in a slow blink. "Accept it, like everyone else undoubtedly has."

"No," Zechs balks stubbornly, his lip curling up in a sneer as he says it. "Something's wrong with you. I want to know what it is."

"Your attitude is unappealing." Treize's condescension is lacking in its usual infuriating bite, though it is not at all disingenuous. "I think you should leave, because I am not in the mood for it."

"No."

Zechs strides to the other side of the office and lowers himself with long-legged grace into the upholstered chair that sits like a therapist's to Treize's couch.

It's different from one of their typical showdowns in that Treize is completely disinterested in scoring or making points. He doesn't care if Zechs sits there all night. Because he can't recall his order, and nor would he choose to if he could. So deal with it, he thinks pitilessly.

"Talk to me," Zechs implores, subdued, grimly serious.

Treize is not at all ready for pleading solemnity. Not from Zechs, and not after all the blustering and fuming. The effect, Treize discovers, is disarming.

"Something's happened," Zechs repeats softly. "I wish you would tell me."

The confrontation, gentle as it is – perhaps because of its gentle nature – makes Treize's heart race, pushing anxiety into his blood. His teeth press lightly into the right side of his lower lip, gnawing for a second, and he takes a deep, shaking breath.

"I have a daughter, with Leia Barton, the woman I stayed with when I was in space. She just turned two, on November 29th. That is where I was, when I took leave. I went back to L3 that week. Leia and I threw her a party, a small one, just for the three of us. Leia made a cake, and I bought Mari – her name is Mariemaia – a couple of dolls. She is inseparable from them. She carries around one in particular, no matter where she goes. You've got to pry it away from her to wash it, because the thing has been everywhere, and it gets filthy. She named it Kimmy, and no matter how many new dolls we buy for her, she prefers the ragged, homely one with the hair all falling out. It was one I found in the attic at home. Can you believe I found a doll up there? It may have been my aunt's, perhaps my mother's. I brought it for her to have, to display in her room, because it's a bit old and stiff and it's wearing traditional Russian dress, but Mari decided she wanted to sleep with it. And then she wanted to drag it around the flat. And then she wouldn't even leave the building without it. It's... it was very cute.

"She was too young, I think, to appreciate Earth, when they came here. We went to France last spring, because Leia wanted to see Paris. I should have told you then, when you asked why I was not going home with you for leave. I should never have kept any of this from you...

"At first, I could not believe that it was Leia's first time on the planet. Could you imagine that? Never setting foot on Earth? Never once breathing fresh air? I believe she truly enjoyed it here. She said she did. She told me she wanted to come back. We were planning to go to China in April. I think that would have been a wonderful trip.

"...They both died. Yesterday, within a few hours of each other, I was told. I can only barely believe it, because I spoke with them only four days ago. And they were fine. Everything was – seemed – fine. Leia's father emailed me to tell me. Emailed. It was the crudest thing I have ever experienced. He said it was a pathogen accidentally released from the lab at Barton Industries. A few people fell ill, but only Leia and Mari died. I suppose because Mari was... just a baby, but Leia was healthy. I don't really understand it. The news clippings, these ridiculous, uninformative attachments the man sent me, didn't even say what it was. And all he said was that it was taken care of. Contained. Is that not the coldest way of putting something like that?

"I did not think I could ever feel this sort of... it's like being crushed. It's crushing me, and it's overwhelming me totally. I have been on this couch for seven hours, and I have not been able to move, because I have... of course I know why...

"But beyond this crushing sadness, there is something more there. I have seen pieces of it. Flashes. Something is deeply wrong, something beyond the tragic incorrectness of a very small child dying from some manufactured sickness. I keep thinking over it, and what I have found is a sort of disconnect. Why Leia? Why was her case so serious? She certainly had no reason to be in the lab, or even near it, because she worked in the tower, if not at home. And the more I think over it, I have begun to wonder the most terrible things. Unthinkable, appalling things.

"That is when I began to scratch the surface of whatever lies beyond this. There is so much to that colony, to her father and his company. Leia was attempting to figure it out. She was digging. I do not have any more information than what her father gave me, but the mere thought of what their deaths could mean has uncovered in me the most potent anger I have ever felt. And I think, in a way, I understand how things are for you. With your parents. I think I saw a glimpse of your mind within my own. I hope – I honestly do – that I am completely wrong.

"And I've thought... so many other things, but they are all things I should have thought of before. I should have stayed on the colony, volunteered for a posting there. Or better, I should have asked Leia to bring Mari here. I should have asked her to marry me, because then perhaps none of this would have happened. Perhaps she would have said yes. Because I loved Leia. Whatever we were, I loved her. And I love... loved Mari more than I have ever loved anyone in my life, something incomparable to anything I have ever felt. I did not think I could love anything as much as I loved that girl. When I think of all the time I did not spend with her, because of work, because I was concerned about my reputation or what my mother would say... I am completely disgusted with myself. Because now I have... I will never have another opportunity... to even see her.

"...Did you know that I felt like her father from the very first time I held her? Can you even imagine me as a father? I'm certain you cannot. I certainly could not, until I saw her. I did not think it would be like that. I did not think it was something that would ever come naturally to me. Once she learned how to talk, we spoke over the net on camera – which was so early, because she was extremely intelligent. Unfortunately it was not live, because of comms and security, so it was not much of a conversation, but I wanted her to see my face. Because I wanted her to recognize me when we visited.

"She would say the silliest things... She was such a bright girl, and wonderfully silly. Last month she asked me what my most not favorite food was, and I could barely answer her, because the question was so delightful. She called me 'daddy,' which at first sounded odd despite the logic of it. That's how Leia always referred to me. But she was already picking up Russian words and phrases, lightening fast. So smart. Leia told me she practiced with her, because she knew how important it was to me. And...

"I hate this...

"...Because I thought I would have more time. How could I know? How could I have even conceived of this? And the worst part is that I didn't do anything my instincts told me to do. Not a single thing. How perverse, that I abide by them without exception on the battlefield and yet treat them as a non-element in the most important aspect of my life.

"I thought they would be safe and that I could rescue them if they needed it. Like a hero. Like a good father. But how could I have expected something like this? How could I possibly have anticipated this...?"

Treize wants to say these things. These thoughts. And he almost does. He almost spills out everything he's been thinking since this morning to the one person he trusts with his life.

But he doesn't.

Instead, he sniffs and sits up straight for the first time in hours. Dizzy-headed, he turns to face Zechs, whose face appears vulnerable with concern, mouth open slightly as if to say something but somehow shocked and unable to. They sit in continuing silence, during which Treize looks at a spot on the carpet and wonders why he can't bring himself to tell his best friend about the worst thing that's ever happened to him. Shouldn't he be beyond this? What did secrecy matter anymore? It was all for nothing. All of it.

"Is it your mother?" Zechs finally asks, voice small, shrunken to a gritty whisper.

Treize scrubs his face with his hands, once, only enough to reset his expression, and then he smoothly rises to his feet.

"She is fine. But I am exhausted," Treize tells his friend honestly. "I am going to go home, and I am going to sleep."

"Do you want me to come with you?"

Treize walks slowly, stiffly, to his desk, where he begins to shut down programs on his laptop. "To my quarters?" he asks after a dry beat.

"I'm worried about you," Zechs confesses with more of that unusually unselfconscious sincerity. He then pushes himself out of his chair and stands, arms hanging, awkwardly unoccupied, as he awaits Treize's response.

"I appreciate it, but no. I will be fine."

"Will you call me tomorrow?"

Treize supplies his answer quickly as fast fingers punch through the shutdown protocol. "I will be working tomorrow."

Zechs moves forward, right to the front of Treize's desk, where he typically stands to report or sits to discuss. The jut of his chin suggests a reclamation of poise, and as he begins rifling through the folders he finds on the top left corner of the desk, a familiar smirk reemerges.

"That's not surprising. But I'd like you to call anyway. Or I'll call you." Fingering quickly through the files he's found, he waves them once in the air to catch Treize's attention. "Maybe I can help you with some of these quarterly reports."

"It is your day off," Treize reminds him as he crouches to lock his computer in the safe concealed below his desk. "Do something enjoyable."

Zechs laughs low. "Like what? Go to the cinema?"

There is a set of four beeps and a clunk as the safe is closed. Treize stands and grabs his keys from the top drawer of his desk. He wears a small frown, one that could be easily mistaken for brooding distraction. He comes around to the front of his desk, hitting the lamp as he does, bringing the room into early winter's dusky darkness. They face each other in the fading light, Zechs expectant, Treize reluctant. The only sound is their breath, until –

"I think... you are taller now," Treize observes, cautiously appraising, words distant and hushed.

Zechs' expression, what can be seen of it, darkens. "If you're going to blatantly lie about what's bothering you, even though you know it pisses me off beyond articulation, you can at least let me help you with your quarterlies."

Treize's thoughts drift back to the place Zechs has pulled him from, and he realizes that the seven hours he just spent were the greatest luxury he would ever have. No time now. Only for a tomorrow that he thought would be profoundly different.

"If that is what you want," Treize concedes against the persistence. "Be here tomorrow at 0800."

"What are you doing tonight?"

The haze of numbness recedes enough for a thin beam of temper to shine its way through. Treize straightens his grief-sagged posture, the slightest of lapses, standing at his full and now slightly disadvantaged height.

"I'm certain that we already talked about this."

Zechs stares him down as if to shrink him with intimidation. "Let me sleep on your couch."

"Oh, for God's sake," Treize capitulates, indescribably drained, grasping Zechs' left wrist and pressing his car keys into his palm roughly. "Fine."

Watching Treize's back as he treads firmly towards the door, Zechs wraps his fingers around his prize, face slack with dissatisfaction. It should never, ever be this easy.

"Treize."

Treize doesn't turn, but his hand stops just shy of turning the door knob. The room falls into heavy quiet until Zechs swallows hard and lets himself speak.

"You have to tell me."

Treize's eyes track quickly from side to side in the dark, stupidly misguided self-preservation fighting back the aching desire to have nothing this enormous and devastating between them. It ends somewhat predictably.

"You are a good friend." He looks over his shoulder then, just enough to let Zechs knows he means it. Because he absolutely does. "My best. Please continue to be that for me now."

A thousand sharp retorts may have surged to the tip of Zechs' tongue, but he only sighs and clenches Treize's keys tight in hand. When Treize opens the door, Zechs is there with him, sunglasses back in place, countenance as unreadable as it typically is in public.

As they move through the hallway, a huddle of off-duty officers part like the sea for them. Their young leader, a model of calculated constitution, sucks in his sadness and anger like a flabby gut, leaving only exactly what his soldiers want and need from him: a future, solid and sure, smiling a little bit, bright and utterly impregnable.


End file.
